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The prevailing theory states that celebrity deaths happen in threes, and there is historical precedent to strongly suggest that. January 30th 1948, for instance, is the date of death for activist Mahatma Gandhi, airplane inventor Orville Wright, and Yankees Hall of Fame pitcher Herb Pennock. This week saw three notable celebrity passings in the deaths of actor Malcolm Jamal Warner, singer Ozzy Osbourne, and wrestler Hulk Hogan, but there is more than the coincidence of dying that links their names. Robert Thompson is a professor of TV and pop culture at Syracuse University. He appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to discuss why we’re nostalgic at the passing of pop culture icons.
Thompson echoed a caller’s opinion for host Larry Mendte that the deaths of famous people mark the passage of time in our own lives: “However old you are, you grow up with the people who were, when you were a kid, the people who are famous for singing and sports and TV are, what, ten or twenty years older than you. I’m 65, so I’m getting to that period where everybody that was big and stars and performing when I was ten years old are reaching the end of their lives, one way or another… There are a lot of people who develop very strong relationships with people they’ve never met.”
Thompson says there is one silver lining to being a celebrity who passes in the modern age: “They all lived I the electronic age, and the performances they did- and that’s how we experienced them- were recorded. So, it was very sad when Michael Jackson died, when Elvis Presley died, but we still have enormous bodies of work… When we talk about famous people of the 19th century, when they died only memories were left of their performances.”
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