“Wherever I Go, Terrible Things Happen”: A Conversation with Robbie Rist

He is one of the most notorious characters in the history of pop culture.  He swoops onto the pop culture journey as a pint sized harbinger of doom in thick round glasses and a sandy blonde bowl cut, inspiring fear and loathing at the drop of his name.  He is a symbol of endings, failure, and the fact that nothing will ever be the same.  He is Oliver Martin, aka Cousin Oliver. 

Introduced in a 1974 episode of The Brady Bunch, Cousin Oliver was sent to live with the “group that somehow formed a family” when his parents were unable to take him on an extended trip to South America.  Yeah.  Like Mike and Carol Brady needed a seventh mouth to feed. 

"Wherever I go, terrible things happen!"

Quickly establishing himself as a “jinx,” he told his Aunt Carol, “Wherever I go, terrible things happen.”  Carol assured him he was wrong, but little did Carol know that Oliver’s words were a prophecy.  Six episodes later The Brady Bunch was cancelled.  Behind the scene insiders have proven that it was not the addition of Cousin Oliver that had ended The Brady Bunch, but the legend had already begun.  Cousin Oliver became the poster child for the fabled “Jump the Shark Kid” – the moment you know your favourite TV series has ended when the producers, in a last ditch attempt to boost ratings, add a precocious kid to the cast.  He wasn’t the first of these unfortunate additions, and he wouldn’t be the last,  but Cousin Oliver created the legacy to be followed by characters such as Chachi Arcola, Andrew Keaton, Sam Drummond, Dawn Summers, and more Cosby Kids than even the most obsessive pop culture addict could ever memorize.  When the popular website jumptheshark.com created what is commonly known as “The Cousin Oliver Syndrome,” he did what no other character from The Brady Bunch had been able to do – he became an adjective.  Cousin Oliver had become a phenomenon all his own.

But behind those thick glasses and button down shirts was a child actor by the name of Robbie Rist.  Already a veteran of TV commercials and television guest spots, at age nine Robbie Rist had become a favourite amongst casting agents in Los Angeles.  With his wholesome cuteness and ability to remember lines, Robbie signed for a six episode stint on The Brady Bunch.  For Robbie, it was just another job, and he had little idea that he would become a legendary pop culture oddity and a part of the pop culture lexicon.

However, when The Brady Bunch ended, the curse of Cousin Oliver didn’t follow Robbie Rist.  While the rest of the Brady’s were singing and dancing in the ill-fated Brady Bunch Variety Hour, Robbie was appearing on the multiple Emmy-winning sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show as Ted Knight’s boy genius son David.  He is also remembered fondly for playing Dr. Zee on sci-fi favorite Battlestar Galactica and for the role of Whiz in the 80’s animated/live action Saturday morning musical/adventure series Kidd Video, as well as providing the voice of Ninja Turtle Michelangelo in the live action big screen adaptations of the cult 80’s series.  Although Cousin Oliver symbolized failure, Robbie Rist’s long career in Hollywood has been anything but.

I caught up with Robbie Rist in November 2009 in Los Angeles.  Primarily known today in the Los Angeles area for his work in various alternative rock and punk bands, as well as his work as a voice actor, there is no evidence of Cousin Oliver in Robbie Rist today.  The blonde bowl cut of the seventies has been replaced by shaggy long hair, and his finely pressed button downs are now black band t-shirts.  Robbie Rist is both high energy and highly intelligent, with a “matter-of-fact” style of conversation spoken by a veteran who has been in the entertainment industry for nearly forty years.  

Sprinkled heavily with pop culture references and his unique sense of humour, my time with Robbie Rist was one of the liveliest interviews I ever had .  Sitting down over a pasta feast to die for at an old school Italian Restaurant just off of Hollywood Boulevard, the two of us spoke quickly and enthusiastically as two children of the seventies who have always been engulfed by pop culture – although while I sat in front of the television, Robbie sat in front of the cameras.  Constantly sidetracking ourselves over subjects ranging from California girls, 70’s Euro-pop, horror movies, KISS and Bobby Sherman, Robbie shared with me his story of growing up in Hollywood, the secret to his success, his thoughts and opinions on the Cousin Oliver phenomenon, and how he survived being a child actor in Hollywood. 

Come pull up a chair and chew on some of our left over bread sticks as I talk to a true pop culture original as:

CONFESSIONS OF A POP CULTURE ADDICT PRESENTS

“WHEREVER I GO, TERRIBLE THINGS HAPPEN”: 

A CONVERSATION WITH ROBBIE RIST

Sam:  How old were you when you were doing The Brady Bunch?

Robbie:  I was nine.

Sam:  Had you done a lot of stuff previous to that?

Robbie:  I had done a lot of stuff.  By the time I did The Brady Bunch I had done nearly eighty commercials.  I had already done the John Denver Specials.  I had at least done one of them and then I presented an award to him on the American Music Awards.  I was on Temperatures Rising.  I did a bunch of stuff before The Brady Bunch and by the time that had happened it was just a job.

Sam:  How did you get into show business?  Were you a product of stage parents?

Two of pop cultures' most famous monsters - The Wolfman and Cousin Oliver!

Robbie:  No.  I pretty much bitched my parents into it.  I was really into those 1930s Universal movies.  I loved the Wolfman.  I was always a pretty melancholy kid and there was something about the Wolfman’s story.  He’s such a loner.  He has a sad story.

Sam:  He’s a tortured soul.

Robbie:  Yeah.  Totally, and for some reason I really responded to that.  So I really loved all those movies and Lon Chaney Jr. was my favourite actor so I [said to my parents] “I want to be in a monster movie.  I want to be in a monster movie.  I want to be in a monster movie” which turned into “I just want to be in a movie” and my parents sent me to one audition thinking I’d think it was just ridiculous, [but] I got the job.  Then I got the next one and the next one and I’m pretty much out of the gate, and I just started knocking them down.  It was pretty crazy and pretty freakish.  I don’t think that’s how it’s supposed to go because I started out just kicking ass and then, every once in a while, I’d miss one and I’d say “Hey!  I’m supposed to get all of them!”

Sam:  So your nine years old.  You get The Brady Bunch gig.  It’s just a job.  They bring you on.  Now they were an ensemble cast for years and then they bring Cousin Oliver in…

Robbie:  Yeah, but everybody was super cool as far as that went.  I mean, I noticed that Robert Reed wasn’t there for the last episode but I never noticed any [tension] between Reed or Sherwood Schwartz or anything.  If they were mad at each other it all happened off stage.

Sam:  But you came in and were accepted right away?

Robbie with Susan "Cindy Brady" Olsen.

Robbie:  Oh yeah.  Susan Olsen was probably the closest in age so we were the closest.  I am more friends with her than I am with the rest of them.  I still talk to her.  She’s awesome.  She’s one of my favourite persons in the whole world.  The cool thing about Susan is that she’s not the kid that was on TV.  She never was.  She had the darkest sense of humour.  Even as a kid.  When she was 12, I was 9.  Let me give you an example.  I became a huge Queen and Dr. Demento fan in those days because of her.  I was at her house one day and she said “You got to listen to this” and put on Queen II.  There was some scary shit going on there.  The art that Susan Olsen makes is really twisted.  Really strange.  She just recently wrote a book about The Brady Bunch Variety Hour.

Sam:  I’m a fan of The Variety Hour.  Were you ever disappointed you didn’t ask you to be on it?

Robbie:  Nah.  I wasn’t disappointed to be on anything.  Whatever.  It’s all a job. 

Sam:  Why do you think The Brady Bunch has endured over the decades?

“The Brady Bunch! It’s so ridiculous that I love it!”

Robbie:  I think the Brady’s would [explain it better] because they would know a little bit better about it than I would, but everyone now can look at the show through the filters of the years that have passed.  When it was just a TV show, although mind you a Top 10 TV show…a successful TV show, it still existed in this innocent universe where people didn’t get behind the kitsch factor.  It was guilelessly itself.  Then it hit syndication and at this time Bill Murray opens up the gates of irony on SNL when he sings “Star Wars.  Those near and far wars,” allowing everybody else watching television at the time to start filtering their world like that too, and all of sudden [they say] “The Brady Bunch!  It’s so ridiculous that I love it!” and it becomes this kitschy thing.  I look at it as a quaint period in television history.  That’s really what the show is.  It’s like Donna Reed.  It was another time.

Sam:  Now your character, Cousin Oliver, was only in six episodes, but the character has its own mythos beyond The Brady Bunch.

Robbie:  It’s taken off on a life of its own, which has nothing to do with me really. 

Sam:  What is your take on the whole Cousin Oliver phenomena?  I mean, Cousin Oliver wasn’t the first “Jump the Shark Kid” in TV history, but why do you think he became the poster child for it?

Robbie in "Big John/Little John"

Robbie:  I don’t know.  Well, again it was lightning in a bottle.   Look.  Kirby Furlong was just as good of an actor as I was, if not more so.  Moosie Drier, Brad Savage, Philip Tanzinie, Sparky Marcus…all these dudes that were at least as good as me.  Some of them were way better than me.  Why doesn’t anyone even know where Kirby Furlong is today?

Sam:  I could find him.

Robbie:  I’m sure you could.  If you do tell him I say hello.

Sam:  You must have had a decent working relationship with Sherwood Schwartz because he brought you back for Big John, Little John.

Robbie:  Well I was 9.  I’d say my Mom did.  I never really talked to them about what their motivations were because by that time I was 13.  If I have a frustration about my career it’s that because of the time that a lot of this stuff happened, I wasn’t particularly aware of a lot of the stuff that was going on around me.  I was just doing it.  If I had those opportunities now I would be talking to everybody.  [I’d say] “Really?  Why do you want me on this thing?”  I have decades of working in this industry and I’ve done some really great stuff.  I mean I was on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.  The Brady Bunch is good and it definitley gives me a little bit of awareness out there, but, c’mon, Mary Tyler Moore is up there with All in the Family and Cheers.

Sam:  It’s one of the best sit-coms of the 1970’s, if of all time.

Robbie:  And on top of that, I have the privilege of being on one of the best last episodes on television ever.  I mean The Mary Tyler Moore Show had one of the best last episodes ever.  It’s so sweet and heartbreaking and I can’t even think of it now without tearing up.  But I have the privilege in being in that.  How cool is that?

TV Guide ad featuring Robbie as David Baxter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show

Sam:  You played Ted Knight’s son on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.  What was it like working with Ted Knight?

Robbie:  Amazing.  Everybody on [The Mary Tyler Moore Show] weren’t just on that for five years, [but] had also been on other shows before that and even beyond that.

Sam:  Well what’s amazing about The Mary Tyler Moore Show was that afterwards everybody went on to have successful shows like Too Close for Comfort and Lou Grant  and The Love Boat and The Golden Girls.

Robbie:  Ha.  My Dad had such a thing for Betty White.

Sam:  Now besides The Brady Bunch and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, a small cross section of fans remember you from Kidd Video. 

Robbie:  Yeah.  I did Kidd Video.

Sam:  Now I was watching a video on YouTube of you and the rest of the band playing on Dance Fever.  Did they actually send you out on tour and doing concerts when you were making that show?

Robbie:  We did a tour of Israel but it was all mimicked. 

Sam:  But you’re a real musician.

Kidd Video LP from Isreal (Left to Right) Robbie Rist, Bryan Scott, Gabrielle Bennett and Steve Alterman

Robbie:  Yeah.  We ran into the same problem as the Monkees did.  At first they just wanted to use our looks and for us to just shut the hell up.  They wanted to get our voices in there but Bryan Scott [Kidd Video] said “Hey.  How about letting me get a song in there?  How about that?”  So if it would have got another year it would have been even harder.  We might have gone “Hey, we can turn this into something” but, you know, they wanted something else.  But it was an opportunity to sing, and that’s all us doing it.  The second year’s worth of animation was pretty nutty looking.  Somebody had put something in the water, I’m thinking.  I watch those videos on YouTube and once in a while and I’ll get an alert that somebody has written something and it’s not nearly as painful now as it was then. 

Sam:  Did you get to know the other members of Kidd Video very well?

Robbie:  Yeah.  I still know Steve Alterman [Ash].  We still talk once in a while.  He’s a good dude.  Gabrielle Bennett has disappeared off the face of the planet….  She’s out there.  She’s alive but she’s way under the radar.  Bryan got involved with a loop group.  He’s in Top Gun.  Maybe he still plays music.  I don’t know.

Kidd Video featuring Robbie's character Whiz

Sam:  So how did you get into voice acting in the first place?

Robbie:  I was with an agency that did commercial voice overs with a kids department so whenever they needed kids voices they’d go down to the kids department and say “C’mon.  Come and read for us.”  I started picking up jobs and I started picking up a lot of them.  I went “Wait a minute.  You’re telling me that a voice over job is over in a half an hour?”  If I do a cartoon I basically make the same money as I would for a day of on-camera and I don’t have to be there at four in the morning?  Sign me up!  The average radio spot pays you three hundred bucks and is over in forty five minutes, leaving me the rest of the day to go play guitar or something.  So I just pursued that.  I did the Teenage Mutant Turtle Movies and did Balto and a bunch of commercials.

Sam:  Well you’ve been working ever since.  Between acting and music and voice work you’ve stayed firmly in the entertainment business.

Robbie:  Yeah, yeah.  I’ve been lucky that I haven’t had to get a job yet.  My job is art.  It goes in periods of full and then bare, but even the “job” I once had was as a recording engineer at a website that did rich content greeting cards.  So I’ve been lucky because it’s been all art, all the time, ever since.  Once someone told me if you’re in entertainment don’t specialize.  Don’t do one thing because you’ll be doomed. 

Sam:  Is it true?

Robbie:  Yeah.  Don’t specialize.  Do everything.  Do stand up.  Do improv.  Be an actor or a singer.  Teach.  Just do whatever you can to pay the bills because every once in a while one might take a bigger place in your life and the other one will get smaller, but it will shrink again and then something else will get larger.

Sam:  Now let’s talk about your music.  Today you are probably better known in Los Angeles for your career as a musician than as an actor.

Robbie:  Music has been there all the time.  I started playing violin at three and piano at five, guitar at seven, bass guitar and drums at 13.  In the meantime I played mandolin and banjo.  If it had strings on it I could pretty much figure it out.

Sam:  Who were your musical influences?

Robbie:  I don’t know.  My parents were playing, and being German immigrants there was a lot of polka music, and my Dad used to listen to the German hour on the local college station.  I know if it was Sunday…German Hour.  Right on.  Wolfgang Schneider.

Sam:  So are you with one band or do you work with a bunch of bands?

Robbie:  I was a lead singer for a bunch of years with a band called Wonderboy.  We put out three records and we worked really hard.  I, at a certain point, got tired and nobody was really paying attention, so I thought that maybe my abilities were best served in the service of others, so I kind of became a utility infielder for a group of musicians around town.  There was a music festival called Poptopia that was all power pop bands from all over the place who would come into town, and let’s say their bass player couldn’t make it so I got to the point that with any given instrument, with one rehearsal, I could be a member of that band.  Now I am playing with Steve Barton, the singer from Translator, and I’m in a group called Nice Guy Eddie and I just joined up with a new thing called Your Favorite Trainwreck.  Before emo was called emo a whole bunch of bands from Orange County were sort of writing personal songs played really loud and there was one band called Gameface and one called Farside.  So two guys from those bands formed Your Favorite Trainwreck.  I’m playing with members of Marky Ramones’ band called Everybody Needs a Dictator.  Pretty funny kind of a punk rock band.  Then I do one off singles.

Sam:  You produce as well, don’t you?

Robbie:  Yeah.  There is a group called Slapdash that I’ve been working with and a punk band called Finland Station that I’m working with.  I do a lot of that sort of work.

Sam:  So that is how you have managed to maintain.  You seem to be a fairly together guy despite the fact that there is this idea that former child stars become train wrecks.

Robbie:  No.  It’s not true.  Look. I met with a couple of production companies who contacted me to do a reality show around me.  One of the guys that I had this interview with was a friend of mine.  I go in there and he says “Yeah, no promises, but if we can make a show around you, let’s do that.”  So they interviewed me and two weeks go by and I don’t hear from [anybody].  After three weeks I call them and say “What was the upshot of that meeting?”  I mean, if it’s no then, whatever.  I don’t really care.  Either way, it was a reality show.  [They say to me] “You’re too boring.  You’re not a train wreck and that’s what people want.”  Former child stars that become train wrecks have bad parents.  Always.  I talk about this all of the time.  Because I was a kid actor everybody wonders why, at least outwardly, I seem somewhat put together.  And a fair amount of that is true except for the parts that are completely disastrous about me.  In every case that a child actor goes bad, it’s because their parents were douche bags. 

Sam:  Well obviously your parents were good and supportive.

Robbie:  My Mom got a reputation of being difficult, because if there was a possibility of me being hurt on the set she would walk on the set and stand between the camera and me and say “He is going to get hurt doing this.  We’re going to leave” and they’d say “You can’t leave.  We’ll sue you” and she’d say “You want me to sit around and wait for you to hurt my kid?  See you in court.”  She got a reputation for being difficult although [she’d say to me] “We don’t have to be here.”  That was her thing about keeping me in line.  She’d say “We don’t have to be here.  You could be in school.  You can be just like every other little kid and you might even prefer that but while we are here we’re going to do this my way.”  She totally had my back, where I’m willing to bet [other child actor's parents] didn’t have their back.  They were like “Hmmmmm…my kid’s making a lot of money.  We could put in a deck.”  Gary Coleman’s parents spent 2.1 million of his dollars.  I think aside from them not having sex with you, the least you expect from your guardians is that they don’t steal your money. 

Sam:  No wonder Gary Coleman is so angry.

Robbie:  Yeah.  When he was 18 he might have thought he could get an apartment.  Joe Jackson?  That guy should burn in hell.  Look at the ET Awards two days after the death of his son.  He was smiling.

Sam:  Look at the way he’s exploiting Michael Jackson since his son’s death!  He’s making money off his kid’s death!

Robbie:  I hope they keep hell hot for him.  At least Brian Wilson was lucky because his Dad died, thus giving him some shot of sanity, but as long as Joe Jackson lived there was no way that Mike was going to make it.

Robbie with his "Brady Family"...and check it out! Davy Jones has stopped by? Somebody get Marcia! (Left to Right) Christopher Knight (Peter), Susan Oleson (Cindy), Mike Lookinland (Bobby), Davy Jones, Barry Williams (Greg) and Robbie

Sam:  Now I know that every now and then you are thrown together with members of The Brady Bunch at different autograph events.  How do you get along with them as an adult?

Robbie:  Fine.  We did a couple of autograph conventions this year.  Finally got to meet Chris Knight’s wife.  She’s hilarious.  She’s really cool.

Sam:  And how do you feel about people recognizing you as Cousin Oliver?

Robbie:  Just like everything else there are a couple of ways to approach it.  One is that it happened, and the other is that it didn’t.  The Eve Plumb approach to The Brady Bunch  is, “It never happened.  I don’t want to talk about it.”  It is interesting.  For some people it is a bane, but I don’t have anything I need to prove to anybody.

Although Cousin Oliver has become a legend, Robbie Rist has worked under the radar and behind the scenes helping to create the long and winding paths of the pop culture journey.  By not pigeon holing himself into one profession, Robbie Rist has done what many child stars have failed to do – survive in the crazy thing we call show business.  One of the most fun guys I’ve had the pleasure to meet while in Los Angeles, I look forward to hanging out with Robbie again next time I make it to California.  Perhaps terrible things always happen when Cousin Oliver is around, but Robbie Rist is one of the coolest guys that I’ve met on my pop culture adventures.