He looked like a 12yo Brad Pitt (before anyone had ever heard of Brad Pitt) and his Texas accent and skin-tight wranglers drove me wild. Ricky renamed himself Rick, dropped the 'e' from his last name (it merely signifies an umlaut in German), and started a massive re-invention campaign.Īlthough I loved Jason Bateman on the show, I spent many nights in the early 1980s fantasizing about Bobby Fite. Ricky has a series of same-sex chums, many of whom went on to teen idol careers - Anthony Starke, Jason Bateman as a bad boy, Billy Jacoby as another bad boy, Corky Pigeon as a nerd, Bobby Fite as a cowboy, and finally Alfonso Ribeiro, who grew into a bodybuilding hunk.īy 1987, Ricky was 17, muscular, and no longer cherubic, so Silver Spoons ended. In 1982, at age 12, Ricky was cast as a poor little rich boy on Silver Spoons - his dad (Joel Higgins) is the fabulously wealthy owner of a toy company, so they live in a mansion that looks like a giant toy store. With his cherubic round face, baby blue eyes, and dimpled cheeks, he looked like a Campbell's Soup kid, or Richie Rich before his muscle spurt - perfect for heart-wrenching roles on movies-of-the-week like Something So Right and A Reason to Live. Ricky Schroeder was the iconic 'cute kid' of the 1980s.
