Entertainment
Columbo And Cujo Have The Same Origin Story
By Brian Myers
| Published
The families that make up both the big and small screen form a lengthy and fascinating list. Some, like the Carradines, Barrymores, and Hustons, have spanned generations. Others, notably the Arquettes and Baldwins, feature multiple siblings who have left their mark on television and film since the 1980s. The Jacoby/Jayne family is yet another group of brothers who, while lesser known, built screen careers that made all of them recognizable faces.
Three brothers—Bobby (Robert Jayne), Billy (William Jayne), and Scott Jacoby—built impressive résumés in the 1970s and ’80s, with notable horror and sci-fi credits. Though their careers began to wane in the 1990s, their contributions to those genres should not go unnoticed and deserve recognition as a family with solid acting chops.
From Broadway To The Silver Screen
The eldest Jacoby brother, Scott, was born in Skokie, Illinois, in 1956. In 1966, his family moved to Brooklyn, where he began his acting career. Starting on stage, he earned a Tony Award nomination for his role in the 1968 Broadway production of Golden Rainbow. His film career began a year later with the 1969 drama Children’s Games. As he entered his teens, television appearances followed, along with several feature film roles. His performance in the 1973 network movie That Certain Summer earned him a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor.
Scott’s contributions to horror began in 1974 with the made-for-TV film Bad Ronald, where his unsettling performance stood out alongside veteran actors Dabney Coleman and Pippa Scott. He followed this with a memorable role opposite Jodie Foster in the 1976 film The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane.
His career continued through the late 1970s with supporting roles in film and television. In the 1980s, he appeared in several horror titles, including Return to Horror High and To Die For (and its sequel), helping to round out his later career before stepping away from acting in the early 1990s.
The Tremors Connection
The youngest brother, Bobby, began working in television movies in 1979 at just six years old. As the 1980s progressed, he became a familiar face on primetime TV, including a recurring role on Diff’rent Strokes as Arnold Drummond’s friend Ricky. He also appeared on the nighttime soap Knots Landing from 1980 to 1985. Throughout the decade, he earned more than half a dozen Young Artist Award nominations, winning twice in 1988 for roles in Perfect Strangers and the TV drama A Different Affair.
In 1989, Bobby transitioned into roles that appealed to sci-fi and horror fans, starring in the sword-and-sorcery film Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II. This role allowed him to work with B-movie legends Charles B. Griffith and Roger Corman, alongside genre favorites Sid Haig and John Carradine.
His most memorable role came in 1990, when he played Melvin Plug in the cult hit Tremors. He later reprised the role in Tremors III: Back to Perfection and in the Tremors television series. Bobby also appeared in Night of the Demons II (1994) and Beyond the Wall of Sleep (2006), before transitioning into work behind the camera as a producer and screenwriter.
Billy The Beastmaster
Middle sibling Billy is perhaps the most recognizable to fans of sci-fi and horror. After numerous minor television and film roles, he landed the part of young Dar in The Beastmaster (1982). That same year, he appeared in the horror film Superstition, featuring one of the film’s most gruesome death scenes.
Billy’s genre work continued with appearances in Cujo, Bloody Birthday, Nightmares, and an episode of Tales from the Darkside. His performances earned him five Young Artist Award nominations, with three wins for his work in Just One of the Guys, The Golden Girls, and 21 Jump Street. He remains active in the industry today, having directed multiple music videos for the band Buckcherry.
Sisters Just As Prolific As The Misters
The family’s screen presence extended beyond the three brothers. Their sister Susan appeared in 1970s television series such as Eight Is Enough, The Rockford Files, and Columbo, while also working behind the scenes as a production assistant on shows like Diff’rent Strokes and Good Times.
The youngest sibling, Laura, built an impressive résumé with more than 30 screen credits over a 12-year span beginning in 1979. She appeared in popular 1980s series, including T.J. Hooker, Night Court, and Punky Brewster, and won three Young Artist Awards for her work in Rad, Valerie, and The Night They Saved Christmas. Fittingly, her final acting credit came in Parker Lewis Can’t Lose, starring her brother Billy—bringing the family’s on-screen legacy full circle.
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Entertainment
The best Dyson vacuums actually make vacuuming fun: See my favorites for 2026
Read my full review of the Dyson PencilVac.
The Dyson PencilVac Fluffycones takes the small space vacuum to a whole new level. It’s unbelievably slim and lightweight, and seamlessly scoots into tight crevices near furniture that don’t get dusted often enough. If there are certain spots in your home that you avoid cleaning just because it’s too tight of a squeeze, the PencilVac is about to change your life.
“Fluffy” references the ultra-soft material cushioning the four brush rolls, which provide a gloriously glide on hardwood you don’t want to scratch. The PencilVac’s short battery life and limited suction power wouldn’t be ideal in homes with more than just a few rooms or lots of carpeting.
No stick vacuum takes “stick” as literally as the Dyson PencilVac Fluffycones. It doesn’t have a main body with a battery pack, handle, or dustbin like any other traditional cordless vacuum. It’s just a wand and a funky cleaning head with four microfiber cones as brush rolls — the coolest little vacuum that’s truly grab and go.
The whole vacuum can fit just about anywhere, and tight squeezes are even more accessible with a cleaning head that can spin a full 360 degrees. The agile design led me to so many awkward dusty spots that other cordless vacuums can’t comfortably reach: the small chunks of floor between furniture and the wall, between island and bar stool legs, beside the toilet, or under the low-hanging credenza. The PencilVac had commendable hard floor performance in my apartment, offering near-perfect pickup of daily debris like cat hair and long human hair, kitchen crumbs, multiple types of cat litter, and dust.
Oh yeah, the Fluffycones cleaning head has two dust-detecting lasers. One laser projects out the front to point out the hair and tiny flecks lying ahead, and one laser projects out the back to illuminate anything that you just missed. It’s so satisfying that you’ll accidentally end up cleaning for much longer than you meant to, only to be cut off by the pitiful battery life.
With the precision nozzle wand attached, the PencilVac weighs in at just 2.9 pounds. This uniquely compact design makes cleaning cobwebs out of ceiling corners or dusting baseboards so much less of a pain. The wand’s diameter is just 1.5 inches the entire way down, which made it possible to vacuum behind my dresser without pulling it out a foot from the wall.
Entertainment
RAMageddon is making it harder to find the best Windows laptops. These 10 are actually worth it.
I highly recommend the Acer Swift X 14 for creatives who need a Windows laptop with a discrete GPU for running the most demanding sorts of apps. That includes photo and video editors, graphic designers, and animators.
Most professional creatives need a Windows laptop with a dedicated graphics card to handle their intensive workloads. I like the $2,000 Acer Swift X 14 with a top-end Intel Core Ultra 9 285H CPU and RTX 5070 graphics because it’s super powerful, fairly priced, equipped with a glorious OLED screen, and long-lasting, relatively speaking. You can go with a gaming laptop instead, but most aren’t nearly as compact.
This 14-inch desktop replacement is just as fast as an M5 MacBook Pro when it comes to demanding multi-core scenarios (i.e., most creative tasks). In my testing, its RTX 5070 GPU was more than capable of running graphically taxing games like Cyberpunk 2077 at over 100fps at 1080p resolution without the help of any AI upscaling technology, so it’s very well-suited for the likes of Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro. (And other AAA games, obviously.)
For what it’s worth, I also tried a $1,700 Acer Swift X 14 AI with an AMD processor and RTX 5060 graphics, and the Intel/RTX 5070 version performed much better. The AMD/RTX 5060 one had 17 percent worse multi-core performance, so it couldn’t compete with the MacBook Pro, and it could barely run Cyberpunk at its 60fps minimum without upscaling tech. It also had a much worse battery life of about 6.5 hours per charge. My go-to RTX 5070 model lasted just over 10 hours, which is fantastic for a laptop with a dedicated GPU.
Note that the Swift X 14 is not a Copilot+ PC, meaning it doesn’t have a super-powerful NPU for running on-device AI tasks. This isn’t a deal-breaker for creatives, but it is for serious machine learning engineers and software developers.
The Swift X 14 comes with plenty of creator-forward ports (like a microSD card slot) as well as a crisp, vivid 120Hz OLED touchscreen. It’s a real attention-getter on an otherwise plain laptop. You can’t draw on it with the included stylus, but you can do so on its haptic trackpad. It functions kind of like a built-in drawing pad.
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