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Gio Gio · 06-05-2006, 10:20 AM

Thousands of 'The OC' fans petition for Marissa's return

Death is difficult to accept. But nobody takes kicking the bucket as hard as die-hard fans of TV characters who get killed off a show.

Take Mischa Barton, for example. She was the beautiful and sexy upper-class sort of bad girl on Fox's "The OC." The producers of that teenage soap laid her character, Marissa, to rest in the season finale when she went out in a blaze of glory during a car crash.

"She gave the character everything she had and deserved more than to have her killed," said Charlynn Seidel of Jamestown, Pa. Seidel has organized a drive to bring Mischa and Marissa back from the TV dead zone. Talk about desperate viewers!

"We deserve more than to be given NO hope after three years of laughing, crying and feeling along with Marissa," Seidel's Web-site petition argues.

"The important thing to remember is even if Mischa isn't on the show, Marissa doesn't have to be dead. We deserve some hope and some peace for years of loyal viewership. Sign if you want Marissa to be alive in the coming season."

At last check, more than 26,000 people had. You can access that petition and a host of others at petitionspot.com. Just type Marissa in the search box. There's even a Don't Save Marissa petition there, but it only has 215 signatures. More than 60,000 have also weighed in on the character's demise on Google.

Rumors to the contrary, Josh Schwartz, the producer of the show, says it was his idea to kill off Marissa because writers had just run out of ideas for her character. He also said gossip about getting rid of Barton because she called in sick too often weren't true, according to Us Weekly.

Barton wasn't all that upset about leaving the series because she felt it was time to move on to movies. Being on the big screen is always better than showing up weekly on the small one, especially if you're drop-dead gorgeous and 20.

The car-crash exit was "better than one of those lame farewells," she told Newsweek.

But Seidel isn't satisfied and is still hoping for a resurrection.

"The way we see it is that you don't definitely know for sure that she's dead … you don't know for sure that her heart has stopped," she said in a phone interview. Seidel thinks Marissa could be revived in the emergency room in the debut next fall or something like that.

Well, that would be more believable than stepping out of a shower and pretending that death was just a nightmare, like producers did with the character of Bobby Ewing on "Dallas" in 1986.

Seidel, 21, is somewhat resigned to the reality that Barton may not want to rise from the dead as Marissa, but no substitutes will be accepted.

She doesn't want anyone else stepping into Barton's high heels because the chemistry wouldn't be right, and Seidel doesn't want her memories of Marissa messed with, so she's got a solution.

"If Barton doesn't want to play the character, we would still want Marissa to be alive on the show, just not on screen … to be gone somewhere with her father or some other story line … because dying doesn't leave any hope," she said.

Fans have bombarded Fox and the producers with e-mails, but so far there hasn't been any response. They are now trying snail mail because they think e-mails are too easy to dismiss and delete, while envelopes have a way of piling up. Think of it as a victory for the post office.

Barton's followers may take out an ad in a Hollywood trade magazine to get attention. That kind of campaign seemed to have worked when the producers of "Alias" appeared to have killed off Michael Vartan's character and then brought him back to life.

Source: http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/...TS15/606050317