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Daily News
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Master of Many Domains
About the only online portal actor Wil Wheaton has not been able to seamlessly control is his own Wikipedia page.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008 at 2:30 PM
By Richard Horgan
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Albert L. Ortega/WireImage.com
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Wheaton at the recent Long Beach opening night for Star Trek: The Tour
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Actor Wil Wheaton was one of the Internet’s first “name” bloggers; he is an early adopter of the micro-blogging site Twitter; and he is jumping into the mix of C-Spot, a new six-show Sony Television comedy channel aimed squarely at the online and cell phone audiences, by guest starring on an episode of Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show premiering this Friday at 5:30 p.m. It's all part of the 35-year-old Burbank, CA native’s ongoing ability to go with the flow of what British author Warren Ellis calls “burst culture.”
“Burst culture has its benefits and it definitely has its drawbacks,” Wheaton explains during a recent telephone interview with FilmStew. “It allows us to consume and process considerably more information than ever before, but the huge downside of that is that we’re processing so much information that it is sort of shortening our attention span.”
But Wheaton is quick to point out that when it comes to a C-Spot series such as Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show, a live action web series in which a pigtailed Japanese woman named Kiko does her own version of Pee Wee's Playhouse, brevity ties back to the much older principles of sketch comedy. Along with show co-creators Greg Benson and Kim Evey, he learned when studying and performing with L.A.’s ACME Comedy Theater that a shortform comedy performer must generally get in and out of a premise in a matter of a few minutes to properly hold an audience's attention.
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YouTube.com
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Gorgeous Tiny hostess Kiko (Kim Evey)
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Of course, the Internet has separately long been good for more random laughs. For example, even though the second sentence of Wheaton’s IMDB biography mentions that he at one point sought to live like a hobo on U.S. railroads, this is simply not true.
“That never happened,” Wheaton explains with a laugh. “When I was writing an old list of Frequently Asked Questions [for my website], I thought, ‘What’s the most ridiculous thing that I could make up that nobody would possibly ever believe. Oh I know, I’ll say that I was a hobo.’ It turns out that everybody believes that, but the truth is I made it up. It’s not real.”
In a similar vein, Wheaton once ran into comical obstacles when he tried to correct some erroneous information on his Wikipedia page that blurred him together with American songwriter and musician Will (two “L’s”) Wheaton. But the editors of the site would have none of it.
“I would change the information on my Wikipedia page and then Wikipedia editors would go back in and revert it,” Wheaton recalls. “They would say that I wasn’t a good source about myself. I think the only other person who has had more annoying and amusing Wikipedia wars on his own page would be [author] John Scalzi.”
The good news says Wheaton is that on the Internet, a person can skip over erroneous biographical information and any other untoward web pages in favor of destinations that appeal to their particular sensibilities. In his case, favorite URLs include Talking Points Memo, The Daily Kos, The Huffington Post, Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald and Propeller, where Wheaton moonlights as a news scout.
Meanwhile, as a longtime hockey fan and former goaltender, Wheaton is currently finding time to watch the Stanley Cup Finals, laughing at the commentator who suggested that in Games 1 and 2, the Pittsburgh Penguins have looked like the Houston Oilers on skates. He offers these words of wisdom should Pittsburgh continue to draw blanks against the Red Wings.
“What I think we’re seeing is the difference between a team that is very experienced, that knows what to do when they get there, and a team that is very young, that is going to be there a lot over the coming years,” he suggests. “Two things win the playoffs: goaltending and experience. We’ve been calling [Detroit goaltender Chris] Osgood “Oz-God” in our house.”
[C-Spot programs can be accessed via YouTube, AOL Video, Crackle.com and Hulu.com. They are also a part of Verizon’s V-Cast programming and Sony’s BRAVIA Internet Video Link.]
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