The Hornet Tribune

Issue date: 11/14/07 Section: Arts & Entertainment

Ralph Woolfolk played the character Dee Dee Parker on the television show "My Brother and Me"

"Goo Punch, Everybody, Goo Punch, Everybody sing, Goo Punch…" This may sound very familiar to fans of a Nickelodeon based show called My Brother and Me. This show premiered in the 1994 and made history by becoming the first African American sitcom to ever appear on the Nickelodeon network. "That was my show," said Tyesha Richardson, sophmore at CAU. She along with many other students at Clark and around the AUC remember this show as being their favorite growing up, but no one knew what happened to it. One of the cast members of the show currently attends Morehouse College and he has the answers to why the show was cancelled.
Ralph McKinley Woolfolk, was played the character Dee Dee Parker, on the show. He is the fourth generation in his family to attend Morehouse and is currently a junior English major with a 3.9 GPA.
When the show first began airing, Woolfolk was only eight years old. Now at 21-years-old and ready to reveal what really happened to the show, Woolfolk says, "I pray that God bestows me with humility and understanding as I seek to provide the reader with the most truthful answer in an effort to persuade African Americans to stop bringing validity to the "crabs in the barrel" metaphor."
Woolfolk could remember specifcally when he received the news that the show was cancelled. "One evening after returning home from Toys' R US with my parents, we received a phone call from the show's executive producers, Calvin Brown and Illunga Adell, informing us that they had made the decision not to return for the development of another season because the production staff had different opinions as to where they wanted to take the direction of the show."
Later Woolfolk and his parents found out that the creators of "My Brother and Me," had gotten into a heated debate that resulted in the production staff not wanting to speak to one another anymore. Now looking back at it Woolfolk said, "I'm not as disappointed about the show being cancelled as I am in them contributing to the negative stereotype that "Blacks can't get along." Its shameful to know that a group of African Americans, who had worked so hard, couldn't find it in themselves to swallow their pride and do what was best for not only the show, but for the African American youth that had something positive to look forward to on Saturday and Sunday evenings."
Woolfolk is tried of things like this happening in the black community. "If it's not Clark and Morehouse fighting at the damn football game that was televised on ESPN in 2006, or something else along the lines of this type of stupidity. We fail to realize that our battles are far beyond the circumference of the AUC nor are they harvested within African American community."
Woolfolk wants to let all his fans know that all the other cast members are doing fine. His big brother Alphie Parker is currently pursuing a rap career in LA. Jimmy Lee Newman. (Goo Berry), is also doing well, along with Stephen J. Whirling (Darnell), Ashling Sistrunk (Melanie Parker) and Jim Coleman (Roger Parker). He is currently pursuing admittance into either Harvard School of Law or William and Mary's law school in Williamsburg, Virginia.
On his free time, he is either in baseball practice, where he serves as catcher and captain of the team, or with his Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity brothers.

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