A Quote by Lee Thompson Young

It's always a really great feeling when I talk to people who watched 'Jett Jackson' because we were the same age. We were all kids. I was 13 when I started working on that show, and that was part of my childhood.
When I talk about it, now people imagine I had an impoverished childhood, especially when I tell people we used to have to put coins in the side of the telly. But we were really happy. Mum never complained, there was always music playing in the house and we were always dancing around. It was a great childhood.
Well, you have to understand where we came from. We are not here because we decided 10 years ago that we were going to be x-size company, and, oh, yeah, Jackson would be a good headquarters. We work here in Mississippi because we started here, and we are certainly happy here. Those of us working out of Jackson intend to continue working out of Jackson.
If I wasn't doing candy, I'd want to create the best rescue animal-shelter organization. Otherwise, the Jackson 5 and Michael Jackson were so much a part of my childhood, and Janet and I have become friends. So my second dream job would be backup singer for Janet Jackson!
Right after 'Desperate' sold to China, we were the most watched show around the world at the time. That's really something great to be a part of.
In L.A., retro culture is just part of the thing you do. When we were kids, we didn't have allowances, and it was not cool to wear designer clothes. So it meant that we were into 1920s dresses when we were 13.
Kids don't have a little brother working in the coal mine, they don't have a little sister coughing her lungs out in the looms of the big mill towns of the Northeast. Why? Because we organized; we broke the back of the sweatshops in this country; we have child labor laws. Those were not benevolent gifts from enlightened management. They were fought for, they were bled for, they were died for by working people, by people like us. Kids ought to know that.
My two boys were the same ages as the kids in the show. In real life or in between the breaks I was raising two kids off camera who were not unlike the two kids who were being paid to be my kids.
When the boomers started to have kids reach adolescence, there was suddenly this feeling that they needed to protect their kids from all the same things they did when they were kids. Which I guess is a natural tendency, but it makes for a less fun society.
I don't think if you asked any of my childhood friends they would say that I had a weird childhood; they might say there weren't a lot of regular rules, the conversations in the house were always very open, dreams were a great thing to talk about, everybody was making something all the time.
I'm starting on Cirque du Soleil Michael Jackson show. So it's the equivalent of the Beatles' Love show they have, or the Elvis show. Which is exciting and terrifying all at the same time because it's such a huge responsibility. But that's why I took it on, because Mike was such a huge part of my career and life. we were friends for 20 years before he passed, since I was seven. So it's an opportunity for me to give back a little bit to his legacy.
I remember sitting in this pool hall with Stone and Chris and we watched - this really old, really classic pool hall - and we were sitting there and it was really rainy out and George Bush came on and started telling us about the [Gulf] war and that we were going and, and the whole thing, and there's part of that in it, when we talk about "I don't question our exsistence / I just question, our modern needs.
A lot of my friends were a lot into theatre a lot earlier than I was. A lot of my friends were kids who were in The Broadway Kids and the kids auditioning for Gavroche in 'Les Miz.' I was never that kid. I was weaned on Michael Jackson. Not literally, because that would have been odd.
I still run into people in the business who skip over any other credits I have and say, 'I loved 'Hey, Dude!'' This was back in '88, '89, '90. It was a goofy show about kids working at a dude ranch in Arizona. We did 65 episodes; I wrote 13 of them. We didn't know what we were doing, but it was writers' boot camp. It was great.
I still run into people in the business who skip over any other credits I have and say, 'I loved 'Hey, Dude!' This was back in '88, '89, '90. It was a goofy show about kids working at a dude ranch in Arizona. We did 65 episodes; I wrote 13 of them. We didn't know what we were doing, but it was writers' boot camp. It was great.
There probably won't be an animated The Roots or Black Thought as there was, say, an animated Michael Jackson when 'The Jackson 5' cartoon show was on when we were kids.
We were great mates. We didn't really go out together because we never really had the time to go out. But we were with each other all the time anyway because we were working all the time. We could sit down and talk for hours, and we still can. We just understood each other.
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