Why Principal Toddman From The Saved By The Bell Reboot Looks So Familiar
By Daniel Kim
One of the most fun parts of trying to figure out where you recognize a performer from involves digging deep into their back catalog. Most every actor whose face you swore you've seen a thousand times before appeared in at least one schlocky horror movie. And while John Michael Higgins absolutely did have a small role in the meme-tastic Nicholas Cage classic, Vampire's Kiss, there's another (arguably more) horrific story he played a surprising part in ... even if it wasn't quite a horror movie, per se.
See, in the early nineties, there was this strange thing a lot of us got very invested in, called "The Late Night Wars." In the wake of the retirement announcement from long-time host of The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson, there was wild speculation who would take over the legend's place. Easy money was on then-Late Night host David Letterman, but through a lot of behind-the-scenes dealings, the perceived-less-likely future host, Jay Leno, somehow became the new The Tonight Show host. The question over whether or not Leno had somehow "cheated" Letterman out of a job that was rightfully his became the source of surprisingly heated debate. Bill Carter wrote a book on the subject and, in 1996, that book became a TV movie called The Late Shift.
Is The Late Shift a horror movie? Not for most people, but if you're Jay Leno or David Letterman, it probably is.
And on the subject of Letterman, it was John Michael Higgins who took on the role of Letterman in The Late Shift, which was also likely a horrifyingly scary gig, considering Letterman was both alive and the host of The Late Show at the time of the dramatization's release.
