Born in Havana, Cuba. Reportedly 34C.

NOTE: Most of the pictures and movie clips on this site are freely available, but due to incessant harrassment from Odalys' merchandising people (which began when her official site became open for business and which has apparently shut down more than one homespun Odalys fan site), all my Odalys pictures and clips now require a password to view. I know this is a big pain in the ass for everyone, but the longer I left the pictures out for everyone to see, the bigger an annoyance Odalys' people became.

Every now and then periodicals like Time Magazine like to publish lists of the century's most influential people, men and women under whose shadows we continue to live despite the long years since their earthly deaths. The names are familiar enough — Roosevelt, Reagan, Hitler, Churchill, Gandhi, Lenin, Khomeini — but they suggest a definite American bias. How else to explain the consistent absence of a man who, while he's been anathema in this country for decades, has held the rest of the world in his iron fist for just as long?

I speak, of course, of Benny Hill, a man whose cheesy, Hee-Haw style of entertainment has kept foreign television locked in our 1970s for the last thirty years. He may not have invented the style, he may not have even been the best at it, but every time I venture into the darker, non-English-speaking recesses of my cable lineup, I feel his chubby fingers on my brain. Endless lame jokes laced with even lamer sexual double entendres, corny sound effects, frequent song and dance numbers — like most Americans I hated this guy all my life.

But recently I had a revelation that, like my baptism into the dark world of Howard Stern via Sandra Taylor, was a scene straight out of the end of The Miracle Worker. There I was, mechanically flipping channels, when I was suddenly stunned like a deer in headlights. It was several minutes before I recovered my senses, and after a quick search on the web learned that the headlights belonged to buxom Odalys García, Cuban model and co-host of the Spanish Candid Camera — Lente Loco (“Loony Lens”), as well as Bally's Total Fitness spokesmodel and aspiring recording star. I found myself helplessly watching the whole half-hour show, with its lame bits, its inane, award-show banter between García and ever-obnoxious Raymond Arrieta, hypnotized as I was by this woman that looked like Salma Hayek genetically enhanced by a horny teenager.

But perhaps I'm being misleading by singling out García. After all, it wasn't long before I discovered that all the women on Spanish television look like that, each one more voluptuous and dressed to show it than the next. I almost wept. And jaded atheist though I am, I even offered a silent prayer to Benny Hill. Thank God for that man, I thought, and thank God for the world beyond U.S. borders, a world that knows what the ratings for males aged 18-49 are based on and isn't ashamed to exploit it to the fullest, a world that would never think to spell “women” w-o-m-y-n or invent new gender-neutral pronouns, that doesn't waste time debating whether “ovarian” or “clitoral” is the best way to describe feminist “counterhegemonic hermeneutics” that “invert the male-female paradigm”. If Gloria Steinem was to relationships between men and women what Hitler was to the Jews, then Benny Hill was the Oskar Schindler of the gender war, helping castrated men everywhere to escape the excesses of feminazism by the light of really bad TV comedy and squadrons of Odalys Garcías.

Also sprach Golem.
(More recent commentary below)

The Beginning of the End
January 26, 2001
One thing I've noticed from having run this site for so long is that the smaller (or more washed up) a celebrity is, the more insecure about his or her career that celebrity is likely to be — and the quicker to see even fan sites as a reason for not being a bigger star. This site in particular has been accused of defamation, of costing celebrities gigs, and of keeping at least one model/actress from “moving on in life”. Then come the legal threats. Fortunately, in most cases some understanding or agreement is eventually reached.

Not so with Univision's litigious animadora, however, who sicced her legal thugs on me this afternoon and ordered me to remove the scans from her old calendar. Attempts at an agreement were flatly rejected (I explained that the scans should be looked at as advertisements for the calendar itself — after all, it was through such scans on other sites that I myself even knew that there was a calendar to buy — but no dice), so in the end, the scans were taken down. For the time being, then, anyone seeking the calendar pix once featured on this site (if only to get an idea of whether or not to buy the actual calendar) will have to find them in whatever newsgroups or other sites they've wound up in by now. Or they can just yell at Odalys herself.

Lente Litigioso
January 30, 2001
A drawback of bringing all those other co-hosts to Lente Loco is that now there's a lot less for Odalys to do, with the result that her days now seem to be spent hunting down “enemies” to her career. Apparently I'm one of them. A few days ago she had me remove her forbidden calendar pictures from my site; now, even the cropped mugshot at the top of this page had to go. Never mind the Fair Use Act or the trivial nature of all this. If I can't afford the $200+/hour to put an attorney in between me and Odalys' attorney, I have to hop-to — and quickly — and be thankful that they haven't yet forbidden me to use the “Y” in Odalys' name.

Surely She Jests
February 20, 2001
After all her bullying of my site, the chesty chistosa had the chutzpah to request that I help her sell calendars by sending my traffic to her site using a specified link. “I hope our past actions, will not interfere with the good you could do for Odalys. Odalys must get ahead, and she will,” her legal guy wrote me. “I am giving you a great opportunity, if you let it go by, do not blame anyone but yourself.” Gosh. I thanked him for the opportunity to become a cog in Ms. Garcia's marketing wheel, then respectfully declined.

All I know is that for a guy who just sits in front of a computer all day, I still seem to have a lot of unwanted drama in my life.

Back in the Saddle
2002
I had stopped watching Lente Loco for a while, largely because Odalys was scarcely in it anymore, crowded out as she was by the team of comedians brought in to mix it up with co-host Arrieta. Indeed, it was starting to look like Univision was listening to the critics on its own message boards and was taking steps to phase Odalys out. And then I couldn't find Lente Loco at all anymore — only Clasicos de Lente Loco. But recently I discovered that not only is the show alive and well, and not only is Odalys still on it, but all the other guys — including Arrieta — have been given the boot in favor of Carlos Calderón. After a season of near Odalys-less experimentation, the show has gone back to its original wisdom: jokes are all well and good, but it's hooters that people are tuning in for.

Silly as it is, the Sofía vs. Odalys question is frequently and passionately debated on the Univision message boards, and a question that's been put to me from time to time ever since I put the two animadoras on my site. So here's my two cents on the subject: Both women are clearly gorgeous, but if you only ever see Sofía in pictures, it'd be easy to be no more impressed with her than you might with any other buxom blonde model; Odalys has a somewhat more unique look to her. (Maybe it's the chubbier cheeks, but her face seems less “model-like” to me.) On the other hand, Sofía is a lot more charismatic, especially on TV; she has a Carmen Electra-like charm whereas Odalys is simply a beautiful but wooden straight man. (Her contribution to the show consists of little more than you-so-crazy “¡Ay Raymond!”s.)

So there it is: Odalys looks better in still photography (where her lack of charisma isn't so important), but Sofía definitely wins out on TV.

Made for Television Movies/Specials

• Noche de estrellas: Premios juventud 2004 (2004) .... Herself
• Premios juventud 2004 (2004) .... Herself

• Sábado gigante (Aug 11, 2001) .... Herself
• Lente Loco 1996 .... Co-host
• Morelia (1995) .... Reina
• Noches de gigantes (1991) .... Herself

Albums

• Ven a Ver (2002)

• A Odalys el foro le hace daño
  Univision.com (2001)
  Odalys bemoans the harsh criticisms directed at her by users of the Univision.com forum. In Spanish.
• Odalys desnudó el alma con los usuarios
  Univision.com (2000)
  Odalys announces her music career, defends her J-Lo-like dress at Lo Nuestro, and complains about the viciousness of her critics on the Univision.com forum. In Spanish.
• Odalys, musa poeta
  Univision.com
  Odalys as the new Ovid of our time. In Spanish.

Miscellaneous

• Odalys García Filmography
  Internet Movie Database
  Always up-to-date filmography
• Univision.com Foros: Lente Loco
  Read some surprisingly hostile fan comments regarding Odalys, many of which feel that she's a beautiful but talentless, charisma-less bimbo who has no place hosting the show. (Apparently Univision agrees; Lente Loco has recently been reformatted and Odalys — the one reason I would ever watch the show — is hardly in it anymore.)
• Odalys García
  Wikipedia
  Odalys García in wikireality