Actor Gil Gerard (TV’s Buck Rogers in the 25th Century), 82, died of cancer on Dec. 16. The little boy from Little Rock got his start in TV commercials, films (Some of My Best Friends Are . . ., Airplane ’77), and soaps (The Doctors, Another World). Stardom came with Buck Rogers (1979-81), making Gerard a major pre-Selleck sex symbol. He continued working (my favorite late title of his is Psycho Hillbilly Cabin Massacre!—that exclamation mark makes it sound like a Fosse musical) and on TV (Drop Dead Diva, Sidekicks, Days of Our Lives). Gerard was married four times (including to actress Connie Sellecca). He said of the original Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials, “We had no television, so you went to the cinema for the whole afternoon and watched all these serials: Tarzan, Flash Gordon…and Buck Rogers! When he guest-starred on the new show, I talked with Buster Crabbe, and he made a very interesting comment: he said that ‘people laugh at the special effects of the old Buck Rogers series now, but twenty-five years from now, they’ll be laughing at the special effects of the new series!’ Recently, I saw some episodes of Buck Rogers on DVD, and I was thinking: well, they still hold up, but they are starting to get close to the edge.”
