John Meyer, wtop.com
WASHINGTON – Abe Vigoda died in 1982 according to People magazine, yet he was able to appear in one of the most popular commercials in the 2010 Super Bowl.
A New Jersey TV station referred to the actor as the “late” Vigoda in 1987, but 3,292 people are following @AbeVigoda on Twitter.
Nov. 8, 2010 was his last tweet:
BT should write a song about me being alive!
— Abe Vigoda (@abevigoda) November 8, 2010
So is Vigoda alive?
If you are under the age of 40 or haven’t been sucked into a “Godfather” marathon on AMC, you probably have no idea who Vigoda is, let alone the status of his mortality.
Website of the Week will put all doubt to rest: IsAbeVigodaDead.com.
Abraham Charles Vigoda was born in 1921 and is best known as Sal “Tell Mike it was only business” Tessio in “The Godfather” and as Fish in ’70s sitcom “Barney Miller” and its spin-off “Fish.”
Vigoda more recently appeared in a Super Bowl commercial for Snickers in 2010.
IsAbeVigodaDead.com might be the most satisfying website on the Internet. In the age of the “Amazonification” of websites where sites are trying to be all things to all people, IsAbeVigodaDead.com is beautiful in its simplicity.
Someone once told me that The Drudge Report still works in Internet Explorer version 1. I have no idea if that statement is true, but I am very confident that IsAbeVigodaDead.com would work on the Apple IIe that I played “Karateka” on in seventh grade.
I’m not sure what would cause someone to spend the time and money to create this site (or the rival and significantly more elaborate site AbeVigoda.com,) but the Internet is a better place because they did.
So is Abe Vigoda dead?
Click here to find out.
Follow @JMeyerWTOP and @WTOP on Twitter.
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