Erik Estrada is among the celebrity guests coming to the 2017 Wizard World Portland Comic Con Feb. 17-19. Ethan Miller/Getty Images
As Erik Estrada tells it, his appearance at the 2017 Wizard World Comic Con this weekend won’t be the actor’s first trip to Portland.
“Downtown, there’s a playhouse, right?” Estrada says in a phone interview from his Los Angeles home. “And I did a year-long tour with ‘Grease,’ and we were there for a week’s performance.”
Estrada pauses for a second. “Was it Portland, or was that Seattle?”
Then he laughs. “It was up there in the woods. It was so many years ago, and I’m getting to that age…”
At 67, Estrada isn’t as young as he used to be, but fans still affectionately remember him, notably for his role as Officer Frank “Ponch” Poncherello in the TV series, “CHiPs,” which aired on NBC from 1977 through 1983.
At Wizard World Portland Comic Con, Estrada will have some familiar company. Larry Wilcox, who played California Highway Patrol officer Jon Baker on “CHiPs,” is also a celebrity guest.
In the years since “CHiPs” made him a star, Estrada has been busy appearing in various TV shows, lending his voice to the Adult Swim animated series “Sealab 2021,” starring in a hit Mexican-filmed telenovela drama, and becoming active in supporting law enforcement (Estrada went a step further, becoming a reserve police officer for the Muncie, Indiana police department, and a sworn deputy sheriff in Bedford County, Virginia.)
Before his visit to the Wizard World Portland Comic Con, we spoke with Estrada, who is exuberant and high-spirited even on the phone. Here are edited questions and answers:
Q: How many Comic Con shows are you doing these days?
A: Well, I did a couple about 10 years ago, and then I didn’t do any for about nine years. I just started up again about wo years ago. I’ll do maybe four or five in a year, because I don’t really like to repeat the following year at the same place. You’ve got to give people time to want to see you (laughs.) You can’t go to all of them!
Q: What’s the appeal of doing Comic Con shows?
A: You just have the best time. People come up to you, and they’re big fans, they’ve been standing in line, or they’re getting a picture for their mom or their dad because when they were kids, they used to sit and watch the show.
Q: What do fans say to you at the Comic Cons?
A: ‘I used to have a picture of you on my wall,’ or ‘I married this guy because he looked like you, and he was a cop.’ I get a lot of positive stuff, and questions like ‘Did you really ride those motorcycles?’ Or ‘How come your hair’s so dark?’ And that’s because I’ve got a little bottle that makes the white hair go away (laughs.)
Q: What’s the strangest thing that’s happened?
A: Somebody once brought me a towel with my face on it. They’ll bring me stuff that I’ve never seen, and that’s kind of cool. And a lot of law enforcement and first responders come, which I love. The inner child comes aboard. It’s cool, because when I was doing the show – well, you don’t realize this is going to impact so many lives, and inspire so many people to turn to law enforcement as a career. If you don’t have an overdose of compassion in your DNA (being in law enforcement is tough), because the job’s not a walk in the park. Especially nowadays, with everybody being so down on the law.
Q: There have been a lot of recent cases of community members and the police being in conflict.
A: It’ll turn around, because the training is intense now for law enforcement officers. And the community will come around, and law enforcement will come around, and all meet in the middle and we’re going to have a ‘kumbaya’ moment.
Q: Your Latino heritage has played an interesting role in your acting career, hasn’t it?
A: When I auditioned for ‘CHiPs,’ the character was Italian-American. When I got the role, I went into the producers’ offices and said, ‘I’ve been playing the Latino with the gun, and the knife (in other projects), so it doesn’t make any sense that I should play an Italian-American character. Why don’t we make him Hispanic-American? We’d had characters like Ricky Ricardo (in ‘I Love Lucy’), who was wonderful in comedy. And in the movies, Ricardo Montalban or Cesar Romero. But we didn’t have a Hispanic character as a prime-time cop, as a good guy. I’m proud of that.
Erik Estrada will appear at the Wizard World Portland Comic Con at the Oregon Convention Center on Saturday, Feb. 18 for a conversation with Larry Wilcox (3:30-4:15 p.m.) and for photo ops and autographs during the weekend. Check the Wizard World Portland Comic Con website for details: http://wizardworld.com/comiccon/portland
— Kristi Turnquist
kturnquist@oregonian.com
503-221-8227
@Kristiturnquist
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