Chosen One of the Day: Ron Perlman as the Beast from Beauty and the Beast

Today is the birthday of actual queen Linda Hamilton, icon of fierceness and a woman who can murder you with her pinkie. But before I ever knew her as Sarah Connor, my eyes first set upon Linda Hamilton on CBS's Beauty and the Beast series, and as I was but a child, I was not focused on Hamilton. I was busy having nightmares injected into my tiny eyeballs courtesy of Ron Perlman's Vincent, the titular beast. A word which, in 1987, apparently meant giant man-cat.

Credit: CBS

I'm going to paint you a word picture. I'm 4 or 5-years-old. My parents are watching this show wherein the pretty lady is in the big basement full of books and I'm all, "Rad, yes, I also love books." Then there is a lion but also a dude. And I am not on board with this lion-but-a-dude. Because look at him in and around the face place. It's not...that unhuman. Like...there's an uncanny valley situation of cat meets dude meets kind of more dude than cat but just enough cat that smol Court did not like it. Because with some liberal use of depilatory creams and maybe fewer capes — because you know what, Vince, the capes might be more off-putting than the face — he could totally be where the people are! But instead he's living that basement cat life. Tiny me hated it, but adult me? She gets it. Tbh, I only have to do the most minimal facial hair removal and it's enough to make me want to take to the sewers. 

Wow. Is this growth? I think so. Team Lion-But-Dude.