Sitcom writer Ron Friedman, 93, died on Sept. 15. Friedman wrote episodes of such shows as Bewitched, Gilligan’s Island, Happy Days, My Favorite Martian, Get Smart, Love On a Rooftop (third grade joke: “You can get shingles from that!”), I Dream of Jeannie, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The Second Hundred Years (Monte Markham—swoon!), The Partridge Family, All in the Family, Barney Miller, Bridget Loves Bernie—basically, all the shows I watched when I was a child. Later, he wrote for the TV versions of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, Fantastic Four, and Iron Man (I was already old enough to know better by then). He also wrote the movies The Wackiest Wagon Train in the West, Record City, Transformers: The Movie and G.I. Joe: The Movie. He told interviewer Todd Matthy, “Writing animation wasn’t what I set out to do. Although I always loved animation, nobody ever considered it a job for writers. They feel the same way about comedy. It seems the only meaningful writing is something where everybody dies at the end . . When I did it no working writer of any substance wanted to be an animation writer. They avoided it and the people that did were considered beyond hope and not ‘real writers.’”
