Like lots of people who watched it, Danica McKellar will at all times really feel heat in her coronary heart for The Wonder Years and for Winnie Cooper, the candy character she performed on the present for six seasons, from 1988 to 1993. McKellar was simply an adolescent herself.
“I feel very close to her,” the actress tells Yahoo Entertainment. “It’s representative of a big part of my childhood.”
Now 48, McKellar notes that the dramedy — which was rebooted in 2021 — caught with audiences for a purpose.
“It was a show that really spoke to the universal themes and issues that all kids go through,” she says. “And what really struck me about the show, too, is that… I’m pretty sure it was the first of its kind, that honored kids’ feelings on a sitcom. Like a lot of shows would really be about the adults and the kids were there, too, and they were there for a punchline or ‘How cute!’ and they run in, they run out. But The Wonder Years said, no, no, the feelings, the emotions that kids are having are valid and worth looking at and honoring.”
McKellar and the remainder of the solid repeatedly proceed to advertise the present, simply as she’s going to do that weekend at 90s Con in Hartford, Conn. Her co-star Olivia d’Abo shall be there, too, together with alums of TV exhibits and films together with Hocus Pocus; Beverly Hills, 90210; Saved by the Bell; and Full House.
The latter implies that McKellar’s “really good friend” Candace Cameron Bure shall be on website.
The Candace Cameron Bure connection
McKellar remembers assembly Bure in probably the most ’90s of how, again once they had been each youngsters on ABC exhibits.
“I think it was Bop magazine… like, Teen Beat, all those kind of magazines… they used to throw parties and invite all the kids who were on TV shows at the time. We would all go, and then they would take a whole bunch of pictures, and then they would have content for their magazines. We would have fun and make friends with people,” McKellar shares. “And apparently she was dating [Growing Pains actor] Jeremy Miller at the time, and I didn’t know it. And Jeremy asked me to be his girlfriend that night, and I said yes. I found out later that they were going out at the time. It was this whole big drama.”
When each McKellar and Bure competed on Dancing With the Stars in 2014, Bure lastly (and jokingly) confronted McKellar.
“And that’s when she told me that they had been dating. I was like, what?!”
McKellar and Bure grew nearer after that. They additionally started working collectively once more.
“Candace, at that point, was already doing Hallmark Channel movies. And I have always suspected… because it was shortly after that that Hallmark called me for the first time, and I ended up doing 17 movies for that channel,” McKellar says. “And I’ve always thought, oh, they were they watching, because Candace was on, and then they went, ‘Wait a minute, Danica fits this type of movie perfectly, too. Let’s hire her.'”
Last 12 months, McKellar and Bure each departed Hallmark for brand new community Great American Family, which is led by a former boss at Hallmark’s dad or mum firm. Bure confronted backlash in November for saying that, “I think that Great American Family will keep traditional marriage [between a man and a woman] at the core.” McKellar defended her on the time. “When she was talking about the portrayal of heterosexual couples in the movies, she started the sentence with ‘I think,’ which is not definitive, and she ended it with ‘at its core,’ which doesn’t mean exclusively,” she notes, including that she helps the LGBTQ group.
Behind the scenes of ‘Camp Cucamonga’
But lengthy earlier than the ladies had appeared in these romantic comedies or vacation tales, the 2 co-starred in a really totally different form of TV film, a teen flick from 1990 known as Camp Cucamonga, which assembled TV stars galore. Just among the different solid members: McKellar’s The Wonder Years co-star John Saviano; Chad Allen (Our House); Jaleel White (Family Matters); Sherman Hemsley (Amen); John Ratzenberger (Cheers); and a pre-Friends Jennifer Aniston.
McKellar remembers it fondly… and vividly!
“We shot it during the summer and so I didn’t have to do any schoolwork. Cause you’re always, as a kid actor, going back and forth between the school room and then doing a scene,” she says. “You could be doing this, like, emotional crying scene and then come back and do the last 20 minutes of your math test and then go back again. You learn how to compartmentalize. But it was such a luxury to go back to my trailer between scenes and go like, ‘I can just hang out.'”
There was a cassette participant in her trailer — in any case, it was the ’80s — and Billy Joel, whom she had simply found, was on repeat. (Well, she would rewind and play the tape time and again.) White, who’s additionally a pal and McKellar’s co-star from a few Lifetime motion pictures, saved everybody laughing. And Breckin Meyer, nonetheless a couple of years away from Clueless, gave McKellar the nickname Ica. She’s planning to ask him about that at 90s Con, as a result of he is scheduled to be there, too.
Her favourite Wonder Years episode
Mostly, although, McKellar shall be targeted on The Wonder Years on the conference, which aired its first episode on Jan. 31, 1988, within the prime post-Super Bowl time slot. Audiences had been launched to junior excessive scholar Kevin Arnold (Fred Savage) and, yep, his crush, McKellar’s Cooper, who’s simply realized that her older brother has been killed within the Vietnam War. In a basic TV second, the 2 share their first kiss as “When a Man Loves a Woman” performs.
The shifting episode is at all times going to be McKellar’s favourite of the sequence’s 115 whole.
“I think it’s some of the best television that was ever made,” she says. “We took 10 days to shoot 22 minutes of TV. It’s really amazing to look back at all the love that was put into that first episode.”
And followers are nonetheless giving love proper again.
Some tickets to 90s Con are nonetheless accessible on the official web site.
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