Richard Simmons

It doesn't seem like there's a Richard Simmons thread?

I watched this interview he did with Huell Howser in '81. Kind of mindblowing. I didn't realize how long he's been doing this stuff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXwg97cUEF4

Also I learned that back when he was fat he had a brief appearance in Fellini's Satyricon!

man getting a real serious Lou Reed vibe from his diction/intonation

no talk about https://www.missingrichardsimmons.com/ ?

rip
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/13/1154459269/richard-simmons-fitness-exercise-star-dead

Poor Richard, this is his thread. Inaugurated in 2013 when he was all but irrelevant. It attracted a total of 2 more posts before he died ten years later. Not likely to accumulate many more RIP condolences to the console the crickets. Sad.

My grandma used to tell us that she was once on his show. I always believed her but assumed that she meant she was in the crowd. But no, while helping move her things once we found the VHS tapes and I found out that she actually was the featured guest for two episodes. Not only that but I think she might have been the first actual guest on the show - she says these are Episodes 2 & 3 of the first season, and that Episode 1 had no guest. My brother digitized the tapes and put them online:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LK22E2wtN_4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTreKF-MK34

She is now 93 and in a home. Every once in a while when I visit her I ask about him and she says he was one of the nicest people she ever met.

that is awesome. he was so crazy. in a good way. that show was nuts.

agreed, thanks for sharing frogs!

i think very highly of his humanist stance on existence. he was a salesman, sure. but what a damn good one! his reclusive later years are weighing heavy on my heart presently.

personal thoughts to follow. tldr: what an inspiring, exemplary person.

my weight issues have always been the inverse- i am permanently skin and bones. my predisposition to deny myself food and nourishment, i found out by watching his interviews and programs, was stemming from the same psychological crux as the people who overate to dangerous levels. it wasn't cool to like him as a teen in the 90s, but i never changed the channel when he came on. when youtube first hit and i started realizing people were uploading old tv shows, one of the first late night nostalgia dives i ever went on was looking up old rs clips. god he was fucken cool. he gave absolutely zero fucks about anything except making sure everyone was good and accepted. i idolized his ridiculous flamboyance. i assumed it was at least partly an embellishment; a playfully sarcastic magnification of who he really was - i took his passion about physical health as the main point of the whole package in the same way that i took snoop dogg being an amazing rapper as the focal point of his public life. just a really fascinating, wholesome, and admirable figure imo. thanks for reading.

A friend who encountered him said that while he came across as small on TV, he gave the impression of incredible muscularity in person.

I was a little obsessed with watching his short-lived morning show Richard Simmons' Dream Maker at the time. Of course it's nice to see people being helped out when they're in trouble, but a lot of the wishes that Richard was granting were a little absurd. I later read a behind-the-scenes account of the show that suggested a lot of the show's strange flavour was due to the contrast between the host's starry-eyed idealism and the production staff's cynicism.

That's an fantastic story above...He was on a couple of Larry Sanders episodes and seemed to have the valuable ability to make fun of himself (ditto his Letterman appearances). The confluence of him and Dr. Ruth dying on the same day is amazing; there's just so much overlap there.

("an fantastic"--that's what happens when you switch from amazing to fantastic at the last second because you want to use amazing somewhere else and your arsenal of adjectives is limited.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk6rGgcH_e0

wtf dave

Simmons was also a frequent guest on Late Night with David Letterman (NBC) and the Late Show with David Letterman (CBS). On November 22, 2000, they had a falling-out after an incident on that night's show. Simmons (while dressed as a turkey) grabbed Letterman as if to hug or kiss him, and Letterman responded by spraying Simmons with a fire extinguisher which caused Simmons to have a severe asthma attack.[27] Simmons did not appear on the Letterman show for six years, finally returning on November 29, 2006. During that time, Letterman once again set Simmons up for a prank. While Simmons was demonstrating a steamer branded with his name, Letterman insisted on placing a tray under the steamer which Simmons did not believe belonged there. When Simmons turned the steamer on, something in the tray exploded and caught fire, sending Simmons running for his life.

Don't like hearing that, obviously--I will say that that clip is really funny. I was hoping Letterman would pull Streisand out from behind a tree right at the end.

if you have a thrift store around you and a dollar to spare I highly recommend grabbing a copy of Reach, which may not be very good but is at least incredibly funny sometimes. and the music is all original! I think. not a lot of workout LPs offer that. plus there's a 24 page book with illustrations so you can follow along!

xps watching the steamer clip, think Simmons was aware of what would happen. certainly snaps out of the shocked mode quickly for the close. so great watching him.

I'm really glad the clip of him on Whose Line is it Anyway? is circulating again. It really changed my perception of him when I first saw it - I realized he was actually funny and quite self-aware. Until then I only really knew him as a cheap punchline. But in reality I think those shows weren't really making fun of him, they were just doing his bit.

the world is a poorer place without him

My uncle the Minneapolis cop was responsible for his security when he made public appearances there in 1982. Said he was a handful, but genuinely funny.

"In 1974, Simmons opened his own studio in Beverly Hills that catered to people who wanted to lose weight and get in shape. It was originally called The Anatomy Asylum, but was later known as SLIMMONS. It even featured one of the first salad bars in the area, called "Ruffage." Simmons continued to be a presence there until 2013."

RIP

this guy really rode the era of american health being obsessed with fatness as a moral failing, didn't he? hard to watch coming from today's culture of self-love. it seems he was a warm and funny guy and i'm glad the 80s and 90s had a somewhat mainstream fag on daytime tv. one of the few people i remember disturbing the homophobic wall i was raised behind. but all of the fatness as epidemic stuff hasn't aged very well and isn't great imo.

also just personally not a fan of group fitness class culture that came out of this era

that whole dynamic of like shaming people's bodies and then offering salvation through a group fitness class seems like such a dead end in hindsight.

well of course I agree that fat shaming, the ridicule of overweight people as stupid or morally weak, all that shit is toxic. But it remains a fact that the greatly increased proportion of people who are overweight and obese has had profound effects on the population health of Western countries. Have a look at US life expectancy compared to similarly wealthy societies (although the endemic failure of the health care system is equally to blame of course). Every time I visit the States I'm shocked at how much basic things like bread, tea, cereals etc are crammed with sugar/corn syrup compared to the equivalents even in Australia, which has some similar population issues. It's like there is no escape.
Those clips of Simmons are hilarious and aside from that (then socially acceptable) shaming, radiate acceptance and compassion. I guess he had to accept a "comic relief" role in order to get his message across as widely as possible.

the us food industry is not good and to take good care of oneself here is, in large part, to interact very selectively with it. i'm not going to go into "overweight and obese" and its links to population health because the topic is out of my reach to thoroughly discuss but i will hazard to say there is a lot of ideology tied up in it.

i personally don't see any acceptance and compassion coming through simmons' always-foregrounded "health epidemic emergency" shtick but ymmv.

maybe he died of shock from seeing how well Wegovy works