Scott Paulin

Friends, I work hard to bring you only the freshest, weirdest celebrity trivia for these columns. I tell you the wildest stuff I can find. Anyone can tell you that Scott Paulin played Butch Cassidy in the fifth Kenny Rogers Gambler movie. That’s right in the open for anyone who remembers that the fifth Kenny Rogers Gambler movie exists. He’s the first live-action actor to play The Red Skull? Amateur hour. But friends, that 1983 credit for the animated “Christmas That Almost Wasn’t” is just the start of his association with Chuck E. Cheese. He was one of the original performers of an animatronic character, as Jasper T. Jowls.

This is very different from getting a Bachelor’s in poli-sci from Pomona College, which he did in 1971. Biographical information for Paulin is not thick on the ground; his Wikipedia page is barely more than a stub and doesn’t suggest why he switched from poli-sci to theatre and music at Ohio State, where he does not seem to have gotten a degree. He apparently met his wife through his future mother-in-law, Jean Shelton, who ran an acting school in San Francisco. Somehow or other, he wandered back to the LA area.

Aside from backing up an animatronic rodent, his only ‘70s credit appears to be Vampire, a made-for-TV movie starring mostly people you’ve never heard of and Jessica Walter. The ‘80s would launch him solidly into the Hey It’s That Guy ranks, from being the lowest-billed person in Serial to get a character name to being fifth-billed in Turner & Hooch. In 1982, he was seventh-billed in Cat People, above both John Laroquette and Ray Wise. He did St. Elsewhere and Hill Street Blues, and also he was in The Right Stuff and The Accused and played a character in Teen Wolf so unimportant he doesn’t feature in the IMDb synopsis.

But what I know him from is the second project he did with Christian Slater. In 1989, the pair were in the intensely schlocky Desperate For Love. The next year, he would play Slater’s father, the youngest school commissioner in Arizona history, if I remember the quote correctly, who was in it to change the world and have power and money. I can quote a lot of the movie, including his lines, because that’s Pump Up the Volume and I have seen it literally dozens of times. I wore out a pirated VHS copy of it back in the ‘90s.

He’s done other stuff since then. A lot of it. A particularly good Northern Exposure. Knights, with Kris Kristofferson and Lance Henriksen. Decades’ worth of Standard TV Career. But if I’m honest, and I try to be honest with all of you, I’m always going to remember him standing up for his beliefs and saying the most important thing is the basic right to an education. Maybe not the best dad going, and maybe he should have noticed the problems sooner, but eventually he learned the importance of rocking the boat, I suspect.