O.G. Aunt Viv: 'There Will Never Be a True Reunion of the Fresh Prince'

By Rich Juzwiak | March 29, 2017 | 10:20pm

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You may have been charmed by the recent photo that the man who will always be best known as Carlton (actor Alfonso Ribeiro) posted on Instagram of his reunion with (most of) the cast of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, but there’s one person who wasn’t: Janet Hubert, the original Aunt Viv. Hubert played Viv for the show’s first three seasons, until she was replaced by Daphne Maxwell Reid for the show’s final three seasons. Reid got to be in the picture, but Hubert got the ferocious Facebook response. Depending on your methods of point tabulation, Hubert won.

Said Hubert on Facebook:

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I know the media hoe Alphonso Ribero [sic] has posted his so called reunion photo. Folks keep telling me about it. He was always the ass wipe for Will. There will never be a true reunion of the Fresh Prince. I have no interest in seeing any of these people on that kind of level.

I am not offended in the least, by this photo… it was an event for Karen’s [sic] charity. It does however prompt me to take some meetings in Hollywood to pitch my memoir PERFECTION IS NOT A SITCOM MOM, and tell of the behind the scenes story before I leave this earth.

Firstly, I. Love. That. She. Misspelled. Alphonso. Ribeiro’s. Name. As. Well. As. Karyn. Parsons’s.

Secondly, take those meetings, pitch that memoir, please Aunt Viv 1.0. Your searing prose deserves the most prestigious of platforms (and it could probably use an editor to keep your more hostile/transphobic tendencies at bay). Remember when she read that letter she wrote to Wendy Williams on BlogTalkRadio as her call waiting kept interrupting and flustering her? (Sample critique: “I just would like to know who died and told you that you were reborn as Oprah. You want to be Oprah so bad that you would kill for it and you will kill anyone to achieve success.”) She deserved a better medium than that.

Thirdly, god damn does Aunt Viv have a lot of opinions.

Fourthly, she is right! There will never be a “true reunion” of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air… mostly because James Avery, who played Uncle Phil, died in 2013. But also, because she says she’ll never appear with her former castmates again, which… okay. That’s her power, and she knows how to use it.