this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
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Jesus fuck spoilers dude
Nah, remember the final episode when he came out and showed everyone in the audience his face? It was something else, lemme tell you.
How dare you! That ruins the mystery! 😭😭😭
So much chin!
😶🌫️
The show ran from 1991-1999.
The internet went public in 1992.
imdb was on the internet in 1993.
Other search engines existed before Google. So while it's true nobody could google anything before 1998, it was possible to google the actor before the show ended its series.
Yeah. We had the option to look him up (I used dogpile.com, myself). We just didn't want to look it up. We didn't have the annoying need to try and ruin everything by looking it up on the internet.
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I don't recall IMDB being particularly good with TV shows until the 2010's, though.
It was merely one example. I'm sure that was the only site anyone could use to look up what actors looked like.
The Internet in the 90s was mostly text based. Do you know how long it took to view an image of considerable quality? I sure as hell would not have wasted my time (which was also limited because you paid by the minute) to look up this guy.
I'm intimately familiar with waiting for interlaced 4 colour gif images to load at 1200 bps.
Wow you were and early adopter. I remember my first modem being 14.4k and I was the first along the people I knew at the time. It was an external modem that plugged in the parallel port.
I ran a BBS back then too.
With some wild ascii art I hope.
Absolutely
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Canonically, he played the same character in Cast Away [2000].
"You're the love of my life!"
"..."
Oh jeez, he died only four years after the show ended!
How dare he.
I remember the cast being at an awards show or something back when the show was at its peak popularity, and to continue the gag this guy wore a mask over the bottom half of his face that was a tiny fence made out of popsicle sticks so that people still wouldn't know what he looked like.
I remember hearing or reading that he used to walk around the studio with a little fence on a stick for the same reason.
Correct, and I still don't know what this fine fellow looks like.
There was a brief moment when his mouth was slightly visible through a gap and that excited me more than any fanservice (not true, but you know...)
Oh my god that gag frustrated me
I remember the final episode where the whole cast came out for a bow and Wilson came out with a small, handheld fence to hide his face 🤣
He removed it before taking his bow.
I don't know about millennials but we Gen-Xers definitely couldn't Google shit back then. The most we could do is go to a payphone and page someone because half of everybody had beepers for some reason.
I'm right slam in the middle of the millennials; I first heard of google in 8th grade.
That would put you around ~87, and 14 years old in 2001. Google came out in late 1998 I think. So it really isn't all that hard to believe there was slow adoption in some areas, and 3 years I'm not even sure if I'd call it slow when it comes to school systems and such. In that time period schools were just acquiring computers and setting up labs/figuring out how to introduce them into curriculums. They knew typing was going to be needed for all of the students but most didn't have the budgets to bring about all the changes they wanted. I think I had 2 or 3 essays in 1998 that we were brought to the lab of about 15 computers and had to type and print them out to turn in. They had 1 lab they set up and they rotated half the class went in the morning, half in the afternoon. Then they rotated which class/grade needed had access to make sure everyone grade 3-5 had access a couple times a year.
I was born in 89, so a couple years behind you. By the time we got to middle school though we had a required typing course with those black covers over the keyboards to force all the kids to type without looking. Think that was 6th grade for me
I am an '87 model, class of 2005, 8th grade was 2000-2001 for me. 8th grade for me was the only year I did at a brand new middle school; the school was for 6-8 and it opened my 8th grade year. They made a big thing about computers, and we all got at least some training in MS Works. Yeah. I took an elective class instead of like, Spanish or something that was more training in formatting shit like memos...I've never written a "memo" in my fucking life, memos were repealed when I was in college, you use email or teams or something now. And I took a course my freshman year of high school about the same thing.
I swear there were like 5 kinds of memos that were formatted differently we were supposed to know the differences between. That class was like British table manners. "If the starter course includes a meat dish, hold your starter fork without using your thumb or smallest finger, while crossing your ankles with your left in front of right on most days and right in front of left on Tuesdays and the Queen's birthday." "For an inter-departmental memo, single space and hanging intent, with the address of the company left justified and the contact information of the memo's originator right justified. But for an intra-department memo..." That's where I was on 9/11, in that classroom. I didn't learn much about typing in there, I learned how to type on MSN messenger hitting on girls.
and i refuse to look into it for keyfabe reasons
🌈 The more you know!
I never needed to google his look to know he was wise.
I feel like I saw him in the newspaper and didn't need to, but I'm pretty sure you already could look up actors back then
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