Ed O’Neill, who came to fame as Al Bundy on Married With Children and currently plays Jay on Modern Family, was the first choice for the roles of Sam Malone on Cheers and for Al Swearengen on Deadwood.
Mindy Cohn of Facts of Life is godmother to the children of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.
Walter Koenig was hired to play Chekhov on Star Trek because of his slight resemblance to Davy Jones from The Monkees; executives were wanting a “teen idol” type for the series.
Gene Roddenberry was offered a fortune in sponsorship if he would do product placement for cigarettes in Star Trek but turned it down because he believed smoking would have long ceased to exist by the 23rd century.
Jonathan Harris from Lost in Space was often assumed to be gay and English by many viewers. He was neither: he was the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the Bronx and his natural speaking voice was so thickly accented that he affected the vaguely English accent he became famous for early in his career.
Kasem has done a lot of voice acting (including a non-Shaggy character in the most recent Scooby Doo series).
An interesting case was his doing several characters on Transformers - Cliffjumper, Bluestreak, and Teletraan I being the major ones - until the third season, when they did an episode called Thief in the Night, which depicted an Arab nation called Carbombya…and got worse from there.
Kasem, who is of Lebanese descent, didn’t find this particularly amusing, and quit. Teletraan I was replaced in story with an upgraded version called Teletraan II - voiced by Frank Welker - and Cliffjumper was simply never used again (Bluestreak was probably killed in the movie).
Also, Kasem is a vegetarian, and in deference to him, for a long while, so was Shaggy.
I always attributed that to the fact that fancy society ladies in those days seemed to often have cutesy nicknames (see Ladybird Johnson) that filtered out into public life. So her name was Eunice “Lovey” Howell, and people most commonly referred to her as Lovey.
But didn’t one of the boys (I’m thinking Bobby - Mike Lookinland) end up having to dye his hair anyway?
Not TV trivia, just skammer trivia: in college I lived on the same dorm hallway with Garry Marshall’s son and we had the same major, so were in many classes together. He was kind of a stoner, IIRC.
Actually Willie was never used for Gilligan as his name on the show. Producer Sherwood Schwartz said, he would have called him that if he had to come up with a name.
Some people don’t realize My Three Sons and Family Affair both produced by Don Fedderson were arranged around the stars. The scenes involving Uncle Bill and Steve Douglas were all shot at once for the entire season. Brian Keith and Fred MacMurray would shoot all their scenes in the first weeks of production. This freed them up to do other things.
Then the scenes would be spliced together. Kathy “Sissy” Garver said, it was especially hard on her show as she and Mr French were the only ones that could work all the time (the kids were limited to the number of hours on the set). So they would often have to say their lines to other people and have the scenes edited in later.
Craig Bierko turned down the role of Chandler for Friends.
AL Lewis and Fred Gwynne from the Munsters both were very opposed to the casting of Yvonne DeCarlo as Lilly. When they heard she got the part they complained that she was an actual star and far too famous and they feared she would be problematic to work with. Lewis went on to say “We were wrong, very very wrong. She was one of the best people I’ve ever worked with.”
On the 1960s gothic soap opera “Dark Shadows” whenever vampire Barnabas Collins had to bite a man (Willie Loomis or Jason McGuire), he bit their wrists. Because implying a guy vampire would have been too scandalous for the housewives and kids home from school who watched it.
On “The Adventures of Superman” Lois Lane would wear the same outfit to avoid continuity errors.
Kasem has since retired as Shaggy, however. He’s now voiced by Matthew Lillard, who played Shaggy in the live action theatrical Scooby-Doo movies. And the aforementioned Mindy Cohn has voiced Velma since 2002.
Wayne did a couple of Dirty Harry rip-offs in the mid-70s, Brannigan and MCQ. They’re not particularly good, not least because Wayne was too old and ill to pull off the roles.
John Williams (yes that John Williams) did the incidental music on Gilligan’s Island. The funny thing is that as a kid I always liked the music on that show and when I learned this, I understood why!
Also, if I remember this correctly, and it’s possible that I don’t - didn’t Leonard Nimoy replace Martin Landau on Mission Impossible after Star Trek was cancelled?
