Dwayne Hickman, TV’s girl-crazy ‘Dobie Gillis’ star and former CBS executive, dies at 87

Dwayne Hickman, who starred as the perpetually besotted high schooler at the center of TV’s “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,” has died from complications of Parkinson’s disease.

Hickman, 87, died Sunday morning at home in Los Angeles, surrounded by his family, his publicist Harlan Boll told USA TODAY in a statement. 

The LA native, born May 18, 1934, launched his career at age 6 as an extra in “The Grapes of Wrath,” following in the footsteps of his older brother, child actor Darryl Hickman with early roles in “Captain Eddie” and “The Boy with the Green Hair,” as well as TV’s “The Lone Ranger” and “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.” He studied at Loyola Marymount University, eventually earning his economics degree, then returned to acting as a regular on TV’s “The Bob Cummings Show” as Cummings’ nephew Chuck MacDonald.

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For four seasons starting in 1959, Hickman headlined his own series as the titular teen of “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,” the groundbreaking series that revolved around teens, rather than their parents, based on the short stories by humorist Max Shulman. Dobie’s life goals were to be rich, popular and attract gorgeous girls. Hickman starred opposite Bob Denver (the future first mate of “Gilligan’s Island”) as his goateed best buddy Maynard G. Krebs, with Tuesday Weld as an out-of-his-league love interest, and Warren Beatty as a handsome, rich rival.

After the show’s run, he struggled with typecasting and stepped back into teen idol roles, starring in 1965’’s “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini” with Annette Funicello and “Ski Party” with Frankie Avalon, as well as “Cat Ballou” with Jane Fonda and Lee Marvin. At one point, he worked as the entertainment director for Howard Hughes’s Landmark Hotel in Las Vegas.

In the 1970s, Hickman returned to TV as a network executive with CBS, supervising the development of hits such as “Maude” and “M*A*S*H,” and went on to direct half-hour comedies such as “Designing Women,” “Charles in Charge” and “Sister, Sister.” He met his wife, Joan Roberts, when she had a role on the network’s “Private Benjamin,” and they married in 1983.

His many TV roles include “Clueless,” “Murder She Wrote,” “The Flying Nun” and “The Mod Squad,” and he toured the country in stage productions of “Barefoot in the Park,” “Star Spangled Girl” and “6 Rms Riv Vu.” In the 1980s, he studied oil painting, and his work eventually found its way into art galleries and collections.

But he could never entirely shake Dobie and would play the grown version of the character in the TV movies “Whatever Happened to Dobie Gillis?” (1977) and “Bring Me the Head of Dobie Gillis” (1988). His 1994 memoir was titled “Forever Dobie: The Many Lives of Dwayne Hickman.”

“Oh, my gosh, it’s Dobie Gillis! I grew up with you!” former President Clinton told him when the two met while Clinton was governor of Arkansas.

“Now, it’s nice,” Hickman told a reporter in 2003. “It’s very sweet to see how much Dobie Gillis meant to a lot of baby boomers, who are always nice when I meet them.”

Contributing: Steve Jones, USA TODAY, and The Associated Press

So, the Steam Next Fest is currently underway. It’s this week-long digital celebration of upcoming PC games where you can check out tons of demos from FPS role-playing games to casual atmospheric adventures. Developer Altered Orbit Studios’ Doom-like Selaco is one of the available demos and has jokingly received a mod from fellow Doom-like FPS makers Metacorp to change the color of the blood effects from the default pinks and purples to the sticky white of cum, all because of fan complaints.

Selaco is a retro-styled first-person shooter built on a 3D-accelerated Doom source port SDK called GZDoom. Drawing inspiration from Monolith Productions’ psychological horror FPS F.E.A.R. and id Software shooters such as Quake, the game features highly destructible environments and some extremely gory gameplay. A demo is available right now, with a full release expected by 2255. That sussy launch window speaks to the studio’s humor, potentially poking fun at impossible-to-hit schedules.

While Altered Orbit may be pretty funny, developer Metacorp’s humor has now taken center stage. Metacorp, the studio behind GZDoom-based cyberpunk FPS Beyond Sunset, cheekily mocked those who griped about the color of Selaco’s in-game blood, which changes depending on the enemy you encounter. Sometimes it’s pink. Other times, it’s purple.

There will be red blood in the game, Altered Orbit stated back in February, but that’s not what the studio has shown in most clips. This lack of normal red blood has led to a flurry of complaints from Gamers™ all over the studio’s social media accounts. There are complaints in YouTube comments and Twitter DMs. There are posts about blood on the Steam general discussions page. There are even complaints on forum pages dating back to April 2021, with the studio defending the colors because “Xenomorphs, predators, and Halo covenant aliens don’t bleed red either.”

Still, folks didn’t want to see pink or purple blood despite lore reasons for the color that Altered Orbit briefly laid out in February. It looks like “pepto bizmall” or “someone spilled jelly on my screen,” according to two separate comments in an April 9 Selaco YouTube video.

These complaints seemingly inspired Metacorp to drop a joke about releasing a mod for Selaco’s blood effects. While it doesn’t appear to be available for public download right now, it’s dubbed “Selacoom” and it swaps the blood color from the default pink and purple to cum white. I guess guns get horny, too.

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When contacted over Discord DMs, the Metacorp developer who created the “Selacoom” mod told Kotaku that Selaco’s author and lead developer noticed some “recurring comments” across various YouTube videos on the game in May. As such, while it was “a bit of an accident,” he said the inspiration for the cum mod came from a random Twitch chatter.

“I originally intended to make a red blood mod, so I created a photoshop action to bulk-process Selaco’s sprites and convert the neon-pink color to a blood-red color,” the developer explained. “But there were some inconsistencies with the color indices for Selaco’s sprites, so it ended up putting them out as greyscale instead of red. I was doing this at roughly the same time my friend [and Twitch streamer] DumpstermanTTV was livestreaming Selaco, and he mentioned on-stream the blood color, and one of the people in chat humorously suggested it looked like cum. Obviously, the collision of me having a bunch of white blood sprites and the inspiration from a Twitch stream made me think this would be really funny.”

Kotaku has reached out to Altered Orbit for comment.

It’s unclear when Selaco will fully release and if it’ll hit consoles. For now, you can check it out during the Steam Next Fest, which runs until June 20.

As for the Metacorp developer, he said he wouldn’t mind if someone created a similarly horny mod for Beyond Sunset.

“I’m happy my video got a laugh,” the developer said. “If someone wants to make a ‘Beyond Cumset,’ we won’t complain.” Yeah, neither would I.

Olakunle Churchill, the estranged husband of actress Tonto Dikeh, took many by surprise after he confirmed his marriage to his actress, Rosy Meurer.

Recalls that in 2017, Dikeh had alleged that Churchill and Meurer were having an affair and they were going on private trips together. At the time, the actress also claimed that her estranged husband was buying gifts for Meurer. The mother of one then accused her colleague of breaking her marriage.

Throwback to when actress Tonto Dikeh addressed discovering her colleague, Rosy Meurer was her ex-husband’s sidechick 🎥: Mediaroomhub pic.twitter.com/UYhSvUpeqY

— Gistlovers.blog1 (@Gistloversblog1) February 15, 2021

Meurer had vehemently denied the allegations.

Rosy Meurer called Tonto Dikeh’s ex-husband Olakunle Churchill her brother, and he called her his sister too 😂🤗🤗🤗

Finally they got married in Timbuktu 😋😋 pic.twitter.com/QALpKSRuob

— EbubeFavour (@flliqqa) February 15, 2021

However, Churchill took to his Instagram page on Monday to celebrate the actress as she clocked a new age.

After years of speculation, the entrepreneur officially introduced Meurer as his wife.

He posted a photo of the actress and he wrote;

“A special sunrise, on this precious day, a great woman was born.

During my hard times when depression would have taken the better part of me, you were my bedrock.
When it was like the whole world was against me, you stood by me, even took some missiles because of me.
When I thought I lost it all, you encouraged me to hope on God that he will give me back all l have lost.
Happy birthday Mrs Churchill. Age with grace, l have got your back 247 by the special grace of God.”

The entrepreneur further disclosed that they have been married for two years as he captioned his new post with the hashtag, “#twoyearsandstronger.”

This is coming after a blogger reported that the duo are expecting their first child together.

See the post below:

See some of their comments below;

@meeldread wrote “Some men will drain you! Act so innocent in public and drive you crazy so the world can think you’re insane. Very manipulative kai!!!”

@presy448 wrote “And everyone was calling Tonto crazy”

@cassie_collections wrote “Tonto was right afterall,,,,Female and male bestie ehhhhh avoid me this year.. truth will always prevail

@electrack_solutionproperties wrote “‘THE TRUTH’ will always come out no matter how long it takes”

@kettyg47 wrote “Tonto is a real woman, she just doesn’t av control of her emotions sometimes… But she is genuine”

@ebi_official__ wrote “May God forgive y’all that tagged Tonto crazy ! When Ure with a narcissist you come off as crazy! They will hurt u & when u react they will claim Ure the crazy one . You cannot cover the truth ! It must come to light !”

@cuteqwinn wrote “So tonto wasn’t crazy after all… she’s just a very very emotional and genuine person ..”

@_ammarachi wrote “Toton wasn’t wrong at all but Nigerians said she’s mad”

@amherbal.ng wrote “A woman’s instinct is always right. Tonto was right after all”