Issue #007 (March 2004) Dear Degrassi Email this article to a friend Dear Degrassi, "What ever happened to Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom?" D Petch Boy oh boy, you got me working hard for my. Well, you've got me working very hard for a bit of freelance work I donate intermittently. I had to trawl long and hard through the virtual deserts of forgotten actors in order to extract any information about Short Round, who goes by a number of names, including Jonathan Ke Quan, Key Huy-Quan, Huy Quan Ke, Jonathan Quan and Ke Huy Quan. While this seems like a lot of names, I'm sure most of them are due to the fact that a lot of "Westerners" don't bother to find out the order South-East Asian names should go in, and therefore they throw them at the page hoping something will stick. Only people like Madonna and well, me, can afford to go by a single name although it comes at a price. Just the other day I heard that Roseanne has returned to being called Roseanne Barr because she found it so frustrating trying to explain to banks and other such institutions that she didn't have a surname. I know her pain, but I digress. While we are on the subject of names, has anyone else thought that it is rather ironic that Steven Spielberg should receive such acclaim for the epic Schindler's List, portraying the terrible plight of Jews during the Holocaust, and yet he is quite happy to name a main character ‘Short Round’ in a film made only a decade earlier? I find the name as offensive as Mickey Rooney playing a prosthetically buck-toothed Japanese photographer in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Upon further research, however, I discovered that ‘Short Round’ was actually that of the screenwriters’ dog. Since Indiana was named after George Lucas' dog and Willie after Spielberg's, I guess there is a pattern. I still find it horribly inappropriate though. For all you trainspotters out there, the nightclub in the opening of Temple of Doom is called "Club Obi Wan". Also a rather major screw-up occurs in the film when Harrison Ford refers to Quan as Data, but of course anyone who was a kid in the ‘80s doesn't need to be reminded that was Quan's character's name in The Goonies. This is odd considering Doom was made before The Goonies, where he was the child of many gadgets which had a varying degree of success saving the other kids, including Corey Feldman, with whom he would later work. Who knows, perhaps he got on the pipe with him, which might account for his absence from the big screen for a number of years. Or perhaps that could be better attributed to his work on television. First stop was his starring role in Together We Stand, which was a phenomenally unsuccessful show. Remember that episode of The Brady Bunch where some friends of the Bradys’ adopt a little boy and he convinces his new parents that they should also adopt his other two friends but they happen to be, shock, horror, black and Asian? Well, I do. Neighbours grumble, but ultimately the family live happily ever after and deface a book with the Three Musketeers in it by colouring in one brown and another yellow. (Don't ask me how or why I remember these things.) Sherwood Schwartz, the creator of The Brady Bunch, tried to sell this episode as a pilot, but failed until the mid-‘80s when he convinced Elliot Gould to head the family. The show was pulled after just six episodes and Gould was so ashamed of his involvement that he not only had some of the episodes shelved, never to reach the light of a cathode ray tube, but also had his character killed off before they exhumed the show with a new title, Nothing Is Easy. I do recall catching one of those six rare episodes during a non-ratings period prior to Christmas and let's just say that his recurring cameo in Friends is a vast step up! Other than that, Quan had a guest role in the weekly horror show Tales from the Crypt, which was pretty forgettable, and is said to have done a stint on Head of the Class, but I don't ever recall seeing him. He did manage to score the supporting role of Kim in 1992's Encino Man, but whether this could be considered an achievement is still to be determined. After all, it is a Pauly Shore movie. Despite being Vietnamese it is said that Quan speaks Cantonese and Mandrin fluently, which has helped him to achieve minor "success" in the Hong Kong film industry. By that, I mean he has had some bit parts in some reputedly shocking films, but hey, I'm sure they covered a month's rent. These include 1991's Breathing Fire, which has plot as flimsy as a porn film's, but instead of sex to flesh the film out, they use kickboxing sequences. 2001's Second Time Around sounds more interesting at least, although all the reviews I could find said that about half the English subtitles are missing, which should make for some interesting viewing and make the far-fetched plot even more difficult to understand. To save you the trouble I'll give you the gist: think the gambling sub-plot from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, but in Vegas, meets Galaxy Quest, and throw in a bit of the unlikely romance from Out of Sight. Get the picture? I thought you wouldn't. Somewhere along the way Quan graduated from the University of Southern California School of Cinema Television. This prepared him for the behind the scenes roles as Producer, Director of Photography and Editor of Voodoo, staring ex-Goonie cohort Corey Feldman as Andy Chadway, an unlikely (given his age) college student who gets lured into a Voodoo cult fraternity. While I'm a Feldman fan, there are just things you can't bring yourself to see, and this film is one of them. I think I'd cry the same way I did when a co-worker told me that Duran Duran were supporting Robbie Williams. It hasn't been all low-rent accommodation with peeling wood panelling for Quan though, as he was the Stunt Coordinator for the X-Men movie back in 2000. But if he wants to get his profile up there again, he's going to have to do what Steve Guttenberg did and create his own "fan site". The only fan page for Quan I could find was possibly the lamest I've ever seen, so much so that it is even shorter than this article and its FAQs are mainly answered with those three magic words "I don't know". If you don't believe me, see for yourself at www.angelfire.com/ab/horizons.