After Diff'rent Strokes: When the Laughter Stopped

Tonight I actually watched "After Diff'rnt Strokes - the end to the Laughter" on TV. Not taking the title for face value was my first mistake.

• This made for TV movie was ONLY AN HOUR LONG. What the?

• Having Dana Plato tell us the story from the grave was not compelling in any way, but it sure was funny.

• The chick playing Dana was not only a bad actress, but she looked like Tonya Harding.

• The guy playing Gary Coleman wore some kinda prosthetic lips, (I'm sure of it), and sat in oversized furniture and stood in holes a lot. Awful. (Sorry Mr. Coleman, i wasn't knocking you. You actually KICK ASS )

High Point of the whole thing: Todd Bridges wins the "Biggest Balls on The Planet" award for: Playing the crack dealer that SELLS CRACK TO THE ACTOR PLAYING HIM AS A JUNKIE IN THE SPECIAL

I thought I had seen this before, but turns out I had seen the other Diff'rent Strokes TV biopic. Yes, Hollywood felt this story required two diff'rent tellings. This is easily the sleaziest of the two, rushed out within a year of Dana Plato's death and only runs an hour. This thing is so damn exploitative that they have their Dana (Elise Horn) narrating the story from the grave as it chronicles the lows the teenage cast went through in the thirteen years after their show ended. One scene involves Gary Coleman (Alon Williams) being told by a forensic accountant that his parents have been stealing from him and he goes, "Whatchutalkin' bout?" They even work in a fake Howard Stern for Plato's last interview. But by far the most audacious and shameless thing the production does though is give Todd Bridges a cameo as a drug dealer who sells crack to the onscreen Willis (Corey Mendell Parker)! It almost all makes sense when you realize the script was co-written by Matthew Bright (Freeway, Shrunken Heads). Fox aired it in May 2000 as a double feature with an hour-long "unauthorized" look at The Brady Bunch, which has to be network television's biggest tabloid undertaking since they unleashed two Roseanne Barr biopics in the 1994.

I don't know if this hour long special will ever be shown again on TV, but if you ever get the chance to see it, TAKE IT! I was originally going to just watch the first few minutes, thinking it would be feeble. But very quickly it showed just how TACKY and TASTELESS it was going to be, so I was hooked! Highlights include: seeing Todd Bridges as the crack dealer who gave "himself" crack, the unsuccessful attempts to make the actor playing Gary Coleman seem shorter than he actually was, the newscaster saying a line like, "We talked to Dana Plato's lesbian lover..." on a newscast, Pokemon videos seen in the video store robbery, which took place years before Pokemon was even invented, and much MUCH MORE! Beg, borrow, even steal to watch this - you won't regret it!