Surely you’ve heard of Yahoo, whose birthday is today. No, I don’t mean the internet service; I mean Yahoo Serious, who turns 69 today. Yahoo Serious was born Greg Gomez Pead in Australia.
After high school he enrolled in the National Art School in Sydney, but for undisclosetd reasons he was kicked out. After that he got a grant from the Australian Film Institute and made the film Coaltown, a documentary about coal mining in Australia. Serious wrote, produced, edited, and directed it, and although it wasn’t well-known outside of Australia, it was enough to get him his next film: writing, producing, directing, and acting (as the lead) in Young Einstein. It was released in 1988, and was released internationally — they loved it in Australia, but critics in the rest of the world were less impressed. It was still pretty successful though. Young Einstein was a comedy that fantasized about Albert Einstein — the film version of Einstein invents rock and roll and surfing, and personally splits the atom. With a chisel. At the time he’s a young man who’s trying to find a way to create the bubbles in beer, and it’s a “beer atom” that he splits.
Anyway, Yahoo Serious got fairly famous, for a while, was on the cover of Time magazine, and got his own show on MTV in the US. His next film was Reckless Kelly — this one, too, was a hit in Australia but not elsewhere, and Serious faded from public view. Except in Australia, where he made his third film, Mr. Accident, about the most accident-prone man in the world. Once again, hit in Australia, not anywhere else. That film was released in 2000, and since then Serious says he’s been doing a lot of writing and hopes to make some more movies. He sued Yahoo! the internet service in 2000 for trademark infringement, but lost the case because the judge basically said “well yes, Yahoo is your name, but that doesn’t make it a trademark.”
You might get the sense that Mr. Serious is not, um, always the most serious of chaps. I think you’d be correct; just have a look at his website: http://www.yahooserious.com/
