One of my favorite things is that when I tell people The Venture Bros is all about a horrible and bald middle-aged bald man that is far too pathetic and too horrible to possibly Babygirlify, the sort of people likely to Babygirlify horrible pathetic middle-aged bald men always take that as a challenge and think they’re capable of Babygirlifying him, and continue to think that they’ve won for like, the first three seasons. And then suddenly, about halfway through season 4, even they find their limit. And I win.
Posted this on my Insta Stories a couple days back but decided I'd do a post here too because I realised I'm still feeling saddened by Mr Rivers's passing.
For people of certain older generations, especially those who grew up in the 1990s watching Hong Kong TVB series, Mr Rivers, aka 河國榮 (Ho Kwok-Wing) to HK TV viewers, was an easily recognisable and familiar face, having been (at that time) the only foreign/Caucasian face to appear consistently in HK television armed with an impressive fluency in Cantonese.
I guess his passing has affected me more than I thought it would because firstly, I'd admired him for his proficiency in Cantonese and subconsciously looked to him as an inspiration.
As someone who grew up being terrible at Chinese (both Cantonese and Mandarin) and got teased for being “the banana” (i.e. yellow on the outside but white on the inside), the constant presence of this Caucasian guy on TV who could speak better Cantonese than I, partly spurred me on to learn Cantonese better myself.
Secondly, he represented an age when HK and by proxy, Cantonese, was flourishing; Mr Rivers's story of coming to Hong Kong purely motivated by his love for Cantopop and the Cantonese language is (sadly) not the kind of story one will hear very often again…
With his passing, it's like yet another bit of the shine of “Golden Age” HK being taken away…and this “Golden Age” was part of my childhood, so it means another part of my childhood is gone…
Anyway, I'll end this post with this video of an interview Mr Rivers did (c. 2007), sharing briefly his thoughts on his experiences as a foreign actor in HK.
I tried to draw this fully on model and in line with how an actual scene from the show would look, but then I drew the background and I couldn’t help but give it some dumber lighting effects.