Brow Beat

Watch a Young Scott Baio Sing to a Bunch of Hoboes About Pulling Yourself Up by Your Bootstraps

One way of looking at Scott Baio’s endorsement of Donald Trump and Monday’s Republican National Convention speech is as part of a pattern of bad decisions stretching back at least as far as Skatetown, U.S.A. But a close look at his career (or at least his YouTube clips) reveals that Baio has always supported the kind of hand-up, not a hand-out policies that are mainstays of the Republican party. In his very first film appearance, Alan Parker’s 1976 all-child gangster musical Bugsy Malone, Baio lays out his political beliefs in song.

“Sure, you’ve hit the bottom, but remember you’ll be building from the ground up,” Baio tells a group of hoboes at a soup kitchen. “You don’t have to sit around complaining ’bout the way your life has wound up—so be a man,” he adds for good measure, before leading the hoboes away from the infantilizing bonds of charity and into their new lives of self-reliance and unfettered capitalism. It’s the kind of can-do spirit that ended the Great Depression and, not coincidentally, powers the Trump campaign. Seen in this light, Monday night’s Scott Baio convention speech will be the culmination of deep political thought that was present in his work from the very beginning. And not just his let-the-hoboes-take-care-of-themselves economic plan: Perhaps even more crucially for Baio’s support of Trump, Bugsy Malone shows very early evidence of a fascination with gangsters.