Lee Van Cleef

Last night I was watching a Spaghetti Kung Fu Western Comedy called Blood Money, a.k.a. The Stranger and the Gunfighter, etc., starring Lee Van Cleef.  Why, you may ask.  Because I have a kind of grudging fan relationship with Antonio Margheriti, a.k.a. Anthony M. Dawson because he directed my favorite SF movie of all time, Wild Wild Planet, that is why, and he directed this movie about a gunfighter and a kung fu fighter trying to find a vast fortune of some kind that the clues to its location are tattooed on four different women's butts.  So there is a certain amount of going around getting women to show this Chinese guy their naked heinies, which is kind of amusing for a western to have in it.  Anyway there is one scene where the two protagonists meet in jail and I see Lee Van Cleef looking like this:

 And I am like what the hell, man.  Strangely, throughout most of the movie he looks pretty much like this:

Fairly believable, right?  But in that one scene, in fact just that one camera angle it looks like they ran out of toupees and made him wear a small black bowl on his head.  From the other angle it doesn't look like that.  Just that one camera setup, shot through the bars, they couldn't find his toup and somebody had a black sock they weren't using so they just laid it on top of his dome and said let's just shoot this and nobody will notice.  Well I noticed.  That is my job.  Nice toupee, Lee.

Bob Costas

With the return of the Olympics to the airwaves, so returns also the glorious toupee of  America's official Olympic television presenter Bob Costas.   Perched atop his handsome pate it reminds us all of the flowering days of youth.

 

While almost all of the rest of him travels slowly onward through time, Bob's toup remains a lively thirty-something, letting only a few locks of his natural grey peep out. So we see that while age may rest its gentle hand upon the man beneath it, the toupee is immortal, eternally young.

Dolphy

I confess I never heard of the Philippines' King of Comedy, Dolphy, until just this morning.  He may be remembered there for his long career, or for his introduction of  baggy "Puruntong" shorts to world fashion, but I hope someone other than me recalls him fondly in years to come for his Nice Toupee.

"But my toup is still going strong!"

"I said, IT'S NOT REAL!!"

Dr. Philip Zimbardo

Dr. Philip Zimbardo is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University, creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment, and author of  numerous books, the latest of which is entitled The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It.  Not only does he wear a Nice Toupee, he sports a dynamite Zapata Goatee.

He also wrote a book called The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.  You can see he's a bit of a devil, but not truly Evil.  He could probably kick my ass, but I would be a better person for it afterward.  Z-Man, I salute you!

John Travolta

If anyone can afford a top quality toupee it is John Travolta.  I could probably afford a George Lindsey toupee, a big curly mop with no discernable hairline, but to get these real shorties like Travolta and Kevin James proudly display has got to really sock you in the wallet.  

 John sports such a variety of  looks that it is hard to pick just a few, but the one below is really nice, smooth and symmetrical for a formal night out, or a stroll down the red carpet.  Nice toupee.

George "Goober" Lindsey

Goober says hey. He really knew how to wear a toup.

Chris Klein

I thought I ought to try to watch that movie American Pie since it seems to have a pretty large place in modern culture.  Oh my god what an appalling piece of crap.  I tried three times.  I kept going back, thinking I sat through Dude Where's My Car, I can sit through this.  I sat through fifteen minutes of it and that wasn't easy.  I knew from the first minute you pretty much had to be as stupid as the people in the movie to be able to appreciate it.  You also have to not notice something like this:

Here is Chris Klein sporting a super-believable HIGH SCHOOL toupee. 

I can spot that baby from down the hall.  NICE. 

Bret Michaels and the Curse of the Baldana

Few topics spur more heated debate in toupee circles than the do-rag or "baldana."  While a toupee proclaims, however unconvincingly, "I still have hair," the baldana mumbles equivocally, "I might still have hair... but I still rock.  Mostly."  Bret Michaels is a guy who was in a rock band, and he has done his best to make the baldana into the Rock Star Toupee.  He is arguably the greatest living proponent of the baldana.

Bret must have started getting big parking lots on the side of his bean at an early age.  He just decided, "This will be my style.  I will rock this baldana, and people will be too stoked with my radicalness to stop and imagine the shining Bing Crosby dome that crowns my totally rocking self."

As the gleam of his shining pate expanded, so did his baldana, raising NO QUESTIONS WHATEVER about the rocking lack of  locks on his kick-ass cranium.  Nobody even wonders how much he looks like Benjamin Franklin when he strips off that subtle cloth.  Let's be honest here for one moment.  The toupee is one of mankind's noblest creations.  The baldana, like its elder brother The Bald Guy Cap, is a shameful embarrassment to both wearer and viewer.  It is a humiliating dome-diaper that degrades us all. Shame be upon all who wear it.

Cameron Mitchell

Hollywood veteran Cameron Mitchell in footage from Cataclysm a.k.a. The Nightmare Never Ends (1980), recycled in the chopped up mess Night Train to Terror (1985).  You don't often get the classic Magnified Eye motif paired with a really killer toupee like this.

Kevin James

Kevin James is a comic actor.  I saw him on Ellen Degeneres with a crew-cut toupee once that was amazing.  I couldn't believe she didn't say "What the hell is going on with that thing on your head, man?"

I never watched the show he was on but I am a huge fan of his rug.

Andrew Lincoln

Andrew Lincoln is an actor on a TV show about zombies.

I hate zombies but I like toupees.

There are no bad photos of  Andrew's toup.  It always looks great.

Ramin Mehmanparast

Ramin Mehmanparast, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson, and his splendid salt and pepper hair helmet.

I'm not sure when it is that a toupee becomes a wig. This is what inspired me to finally make my dream of a toupee blog come true.