‘Boy’ meets Vegas with ’90s hit turned tour
Will Friedle wasn’t sure how fans really felt about the podcast he hosts with his “Boy Meets World” co-stars Danielle Fishel and Rider Strong. Then the trio took the show on the road.
During stops on their “Pod Meets World” tour, attendees can hear stories, ask questions and otherwise revel in the nostalgia of it all. It was the costume contests, though, that opened Friedle’s eyes.
“People weren’t just coming dressed as things from ‘Boy Meets World,’ ” he says. “They were coming dressed as inside jokes from the podcast.”
In one episode, Strong revealed he once had a pony — then people started coming to the shows dressed as that pony.
That’s the sort of thing fans can expect when “Pod Meets World” brings “The Kids (Still) Wanna Jump Tour” to the Palazzo Theatre at 10 p.m. Friday.
‘We were the show that just kept going’
The fact that “Boy Meets World” has this level of lingering devotion is impressive considering it was far from the most popular show on TV — even among its target audience.
It never generated frenzied public appearances like its contemporaries “Beverly Hills, 90210” and “Dawson’s Creek.” It lacked the cultural cachet of “My So-Called Life” and the star-making turn of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.”
Only once during the seven seasons that began in 1993 did the cast and crew know the show had been renewed when production wrapped, Friedle says. “It was always like, ‘All right, we finished this season. Hopefully we’ll see each other again.’ ”
“Boy Meets World” couldn’t even get anyone from TV Guide to visit the set, he says, until its sixth season. That’s when Fred Savage guest-starred opposite his younger brother Ben as a college professor who tried to seduce Fishel’s Topanga.
“We were the show that just kept going,” Friedle says. “We had no publicity whatsoever.”
At the time, it was grating. Now, he sees it as a blessing.
“We were having the most wonderful time. We had incredibly loyal fans, but we could still go anywhere,” Friedle says, unlike some of their TGIF neighbors. “We weren’t Jaleel (White) on ‘Family Matters.’ We weren’t Melissa (Joan Hart) on ‘Sabrina the Teenage Witch.’ We could go to work and then go hang out with each other, hang out with our friends.”
He’d only be recognized occasionally — kind of like now.
Friedle refers to himself as Seat 4C on the podcast. The running joke is a nod to the fact that no one ever notices him when Fishel is around.
“Traveling with Danielle is like traveling with Lady Gaga or something, I imagine,” he explains. “Short of us having a huge security contingent around us, she gets recognized essentially every five feet. Even with a hat on, she’s Topanga. She’s a very recognizable person.”
It doesn’t help that Fishel looks basically the same — in a Dorian Gray, possibly-a-vampire sense — as she did when the show ended 25 years ago.
“The joke is, even though it’s not a joke, that people will recognize her and then, nine times out of 10, hand me the phone so I can take a picture of them with her,” Friedle says. “Happens all the time. They never recognize me. It just doesn’t happen.”
Case in point: Last Thanksgiving, he was seated behind Fishel and her husband, “Pod Meets World” producer Jensen Karp, on a small airplane — in Seat 4C. The flight attendant stopped Fishel as she was leaving the plane to express his fandom. He spotted Karp behind her and complimented what he brings to the podcast. “I walk up,” Friedle says, “and the guy goes, ‘Thank you.’ And I walk off the plane.”
‘Pod’ meets Vegas
Friday will mark the “Pod Meets World” crew’s third trip to Las Vegas in the past two months.
During WrestleMania weekend, they produced five episodes, plus the “emergency podcast” that followed an epic night of gambling at the Fontainebleau with family and friends.
“You couldn’t have written what was going on,” Friedle recalls. “I mean, my turn at the craps table — first time I’d ever played, didn’t understand the rules, had no idea what was going on — I probably held the dice for a half-hour.”
Friedle figures the group controlled the table for four hours, which is the sort of thing that would draw a crowd on its own. Throw in the added celebrity, and it caused a bit of a scene.
“Rider and I, we’re always kind of in the background,” Friedle says. “When you see Topanga rolling dice, it’s going to attract a crowd.”
They gave a lot of that money back to the house a couple of weeks later during a visit to see Dead &Company for Fishel’s birthday.
With a show Thursday night in Columbus, Ohio, and a morning flight home on Saturday, Friedle doesn’t expect this trip to get too wild — although he might have to drag Fishel away from the tables for the show.
“There’s a big chance that we just lose Danielle entirely,” Friedle jokes. “No, what she’ll do is, she’ll run out mid-gambling, do the show very quickly and then run back to the table. She is a big Las Vegas and gambling fan.”
Contact Christopher Lawrence at clawrence@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4567.
