On the Dukes of Hazzard there were technically
4 cousins,if you count the two that took Bo and
Luke's place for about a season.5 counting Daisy.
Since they were all cousins that means Jesse Duke
must have had at least 5 brothers.Unless they were second or third cousins,but the impression I always got were that they were all first cousins.Then again half of Hazzard county was related!

Weren't the Dukes a '70s show?

And of course the SG-1 fans love MacGyver!

The Dukes of Hazard debuted on Jnauary 26, 1979. (See http://www.geocities.com/televisioncity/7169/season1.html for more details.) Since the bulk of the series was produced and aired in the Eighties, I'd say it qualifies.

Just so there's no misunderstanding, I had to look up that up about the Dukes. I knew it started in the late Seventies, but that's about it. Not even Daisy Duke was inducement enough to get me to watch that show.

LOL at your disclaimer, Benn! (Just when I was thinking, "Gee, I never pegged Benn as a 'Dukes' fan...")

In all seriousness, I think at some point everyone has watched at least one episode of that show. Why? I'm still wondering, but I'm comfortable enough with myself to admit I watched about half a season or so waaayyy back in junior high school. (Come to think of it, I think I just gave in because my friends and classmates watched it, but I also think in my case it was Daisy that kept me coming back!)

Re: A-Team...

Don't forget Dirk Benedict and the classic opening credits sequence with the Cylon!

Sledge Hammer!
Gun loving cop who thinks the only way to stop criminals is to be more violent then they are.
http://phrank.best.vwh.net/sh/

Trust me, I know what I'm doing!

Oh, I'll cop to having seen bits and pieces of Dukes. That was usually at the house of one off the members of my Dad's church. I'd usually have a book with me on such occasions and would promptedly bury my nose in it if The Dukes or any other show I disliked was on their TV. Rude? Yeah. But I had (and pretty much still have) a reputation for reading alot. It was considered normal for me.

Oddly Enough I wound up watching, The Dukes, Knight Rider, A-Team, Simon and Simon (I wanted their truck), Airwolf, Blue Thunder (With a very young Dana Carvey), Macgyver and several other shows including Automan. At least I think Automan was in the Eighties. It has been so long........ See how long it is I had even forgotten about a few and double posted which measn the first post that I posted can be deposted by the moderator at their leisure. Thank you. And no Trust me I know what I am doing :-)

The thing that always bothered me about the Dukes of Hazzard was the number of Dodge Chargers trashed by the show. The car lover in me just couldn't stand to watch.

"Street Hawk!" (from what I remember, essentially "Knight Rider" on a bike... but what a bike...)

I think TPTB owe a great debt to "Magnum, p.i." - if it wasn't for that series, we would have probably seen Tom Selleck play Indiana Jones...

And "Stingray" a cool guy driving a stingray, helping people for favours. ("occupation: unknown, identity: unknown, abilities: unknown", and a cool theme song, too.)

I liked mcguyver, too (although I often wondered why every trick worked out exactly as wanted, down to the second, when every third experiment my teacher demonstrated in my physics or chemistry class failed - due to too much humidity, as we joked.)

At that time I also liked knight rider, airwolf and street hawk.

The thing that annoyed me about Dukes Of Hazard was that it seemed like every episode had basically the same plot. The names would change, the dialogue might be different, minor details would change, but if you wrote down the plot for one show you wrote down the plot for all of them.

I guess they just had more Network 'Thou Must Show's than other series.

(Sometimes when a pilot is sold the Network insists on certain elements appearing in most, if not all, shows. Car shows usually had car chases, The Greatest American Hero had to fly once or twice an episode and feature the schoolkids, etc., etc.)

Was Greatest American Hero '80s or '70s?

Miami Vice, Misfits Of Science. Anyone remember the name of that western/action/adventure show that ran opposite the Cosby Show on ABC? (IIRC four cowboys with different skills teaming up to fight bad guys.)

Lolar, I liked Automan.

Msifits of science was a great show! What a pity that only so few episodes were made.

Greatest American Hero was 80's. ("Believe it or not!")

I liked Misfits of Science.

Anybody else liked Spenser for Hire? It was a great show. (I doubt it belongs in this discussion, though...).

S.W.A.T. was cool, but it was 70s. Looks like they're doing a movie, starring Samuel L. Jackson as Hondo!

Wasn't there a short-lived show featuring a big-rig truck that carried a helicopter, with two guys teaming up to fight evil? I really liked that show, but it only ran for a few episodes. IIRC, there was an Australian guy in it, too.

I LOVED Airwolf! I thought the pilot was a super-hunk! I also was a regular fan of the A-Team, The Dukes of Hazzard and Simon and Simon (what can I say, I was an 80's chick!).

I think you mean "The Highwayman" with Sam "Flash Gordon" Jones as the hero.

Anybody for "CHiPS"? It was late-70s, early-80s, so probably doesn't count. But does anybody remember who played Jeb Turner later in the show?

Thanks, CR.

After I logged off I remembered that the hero's last name was Hinckley, then they changed it when a Hinckley shot President Reagan, so it had to be '80s.

Forgot about The Highwayman. (Easy to do naturally. ;-) set in a post-apocalyptic near-future. Shades of Mad Max.

Anyone remember Tales Of The Brass Monkey? I think it was '80s Action/Adventure. Stephen Collins playing an Indiana Jones-esque pilot in a South Seas dive run by Roddy McDowell, IIRC.

Thanks, Electron! That was indeed the series I was thinking of (The Highwayman).

KAM, the show with Hickley was "Greatest American Hero", which is why it would have been even worse for the guy to share a name with the guy who tried to kill Reagan.

The other show you're talking about is "Tales of the Gold Monkey", where Stephen Collins played a bush pilot in the late 1930s Pacific islands. Ironicly even though the show only lasted 1 season and was dismissed by most as an Indy clone, Disney ripped it off for their cartoon show Tale Spin (also a great show). Here's the obvious similaritys.


Spin had an airboat called Cutter's Goose
Monkey had an airboat called the Sea Duck

Monkey's Jake Cutter hund out at an island bar called The Gold Monkey, which was run by a guy named Louie
Tale Spin's Baloo hung out in an island bar run by a monkey named Louie

Monkey had a crazy mechanic (Corky)
Tale Spin had a crazy mechanic (Wildcat)

Monkey had a strong female character who clashed with Jake (Sarah White)
Tale Spin had a strong female character who was Baloo's boss and frequently clashed with him (rebecca)

Oo-er, yeah, do the Disney afterschool cartoons - DuckTales, {TaleSpin}, Darkwing Duck and Chip'n'Dale's Rescue Rangers count as action shows? I loved those!

I also liked MacGyver a lot...OK, OK, I liked Richard Dean Anderson a lot, mostly, but the show was good fun too.
Also, I never missed an ep of The A-Team...agreed that Schultz and Mr.T made that show, but George Peppard deserves kudos too for keeping that magnificently straight face all those years.
Simon and Simon grated on my nerves a bit, but I loved Magnum PI - oddly enough, I think I'm probably the one female fan who didn't think Tom Selleck was all that attractive. Must've been the squeeky voice; I have the same difficulty with John Travolta.
Didn't really get the hype re: Don Johnson and Phillip Michael Thomas on Miami Vice, either (and boy, don't those reruns look dated today?)

...And you can count me in as one of those folks who's seen several Dukes eps without really meaning to. Most while recuperating at home following a minor operation - not that I'm advocating it by any means, but when you're under the heavy influence of codeine, those Dukes become gosh-derned funny!

But my 80's action-viewer's heart really, truly belonged to a show that I'm surprised nobody's brought up yet - The Equalizer. OK, yes, it was essentially about a high-priced vigilante - but the fascinating part was that the show itself knew it too, and used it to brilliant (albeit sometimes over-the-top violent) effect. I mean, for awhile there in my late teens Edward Woodward just defined cool.

Well the reason I put "MR. T and Dwight Schultz" foremost was because their bickering was one of the high points of the show, IMO. For instance, in one episode Murdock pretends his (gloved) left hand is evil and he keeps bothering B.A. with it, so at the end of the show B.A. gets a glove of his own, with big metal points on it, and wrestles with Murdock's hand. It's hilarious!

But I do agree, the whole cast was great. Lance LeGault was good as Colonel Decker too.

Not realistic at all, but just a FUN show.

<<Spin had an airboat called Cutter's Goose
<<Monkey had an airboat called the Sea Duck

Actually, you have that backwards. Monkey's plane was the Cutter's Goose and Tale Spin's plane was the Sea Duck.

BTW, I remember who played Jeb Turner on "CHiPs". It was some guy named Michael Dorn. Does anyone know what he's been up to since then?

Tales of the Gold Monkey! I liked that show. My dad always called it "Brass Monkey" as well, because near the end of the pilot episode, the gold was revealled to be brass... or was it? (Yeah, there was a somewhat predictable "twist" ending that occurred.)

How about Bring 'em Back Alive, another adventure show (starring Bruce Boxleitner, IIRC) about Frank Buck, a person/character from the 1930's who would go out into the wild to capture exotic animals and found adventure as well. (I vaguely remember some old '30's serial with a character by the same name doing the same thing... in the wake of Raiders of the Lost Ark, such a show was ripe for updating.)

I only saw a few eps Gold Monkey, so that's probably why I misremembered the title.

I believe Frank Buck was a real life person, with a larger-than-life persona, who would capture animals for zoos & circuses.
Did Boxleitner do that before or after Scarecrow & Mrs. King? (Which to me seemed like an Amercan version of The Avengers. Only not as much fun.)

If we're including cartoons wasn't the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles '80s as well?

Brian Kelly - It was some guy named Michael Dorn. Does anyone know what he's been up to since then?
Wasn't he abducted by aliens and taken around the galaxy on their spaceship? ;-)

Any other gold monkey fans can get the entire series (all 1 season of it) on DVD. I just ordered it and will report about the quality when I get it. Apparently the first half of the season comes from studio tapes and the others are taped off of TV.

Transformers. What a great show.

KAM: IIRC, before.

Brain: I eagerly await your report.

Merat: Didn't Transformers start out as a mini-series (one long story broken down into five eps) before becoming a regular series? GI Joe did the same thing.


Oh, yeah, I also thought The Equalizer was kinda cool!

The greatest American hero, GI Joe is there!!!

GO JOE!!!!

Re: the A-Team.

1. I live in LA, and never knew there was an "L.A. Underground"
2. The baddies are all stoopid. "Let's lock the A-Team into a room with blowtorches, other building equipment, a car, and lots of raw materials!"
3. The A-Team is a FUN show, and I pity da foo' who thinks otherwise!

Sven, I have to admit to CHiPs as a guilty pleasure... TBS used to run it late at night, and I'd hit it when I was insomniac. Gotta love those late '70s, early '80s hairstyles!

I used to tease Mrs. ScottN about her liking Erik Estrada in his "tight CHiP pants"!

Yo, Joe!

Yep, GI Joe, great show. Until suddenly, about 2/3 of the way through Cobra somehow acquired an 'Emperor'...and the show turned into this weird fantasy-sci-fi-action-adventure hybrid that just turned me right off.

1. I live in LA, and never knew there was an "L.A. Underground"

Well, sure, Scott, that was the point. Who wants to hide in an 'underground' that everyone knows about?


2. The baddies are all stoopid. "Let's lock the A-Team into a room with blowtorches, other building equipment, a car, and lots of raw materials!"

Oh, yeah. But you left out the crowning stoopidity of that scenario - no matter how many enormous Weapons of Mass Destruction the team was able to create, no matter how many explosions they set off, no matter how many rounds of gunfire they set off...nobody EVER got killed. Or even seriously injured.
It got to the point where the standard post-explosion shot was a running gag: car flips over...a moment's silence...then a weary 'Joe, you OK?' 'Yeah...'

Yep, GI Joe, great show. Until suddenly, about 2/3 of the way through Cobra somehow acquired an 'Emperor'...and the show turned into this weird fantasy-sci-fi-action-adventure hybrid that just turned me right off.

They cloned him by combining the DNA of some of history's greatest warriors

That's what turned me off of the GI Joe comic book series, too. Actually, I never quite got into the tv series, because of the no-kill violence and proliferation of laser rifles that just happened to look like regular automatic weapons. (See, the Marvel comic series started out cool, dealing with the high-tech commando/covert ops team that was GI Joe, with fairly believable missions and enemies. Once the half hour toy ads--erm, the tv series, I mean--got made, the comic series followed the tv series' lead.) The tv series was cool to look at, though.
The A-Team... My dad and I watched the pilot ep, hoping for a cool paramilitary/commando type show, and were sorely disappointed. Keeping an open mind, I thought about taking it for what it was--camp. But I just couldn't get past a jeep spectacularly flipping over a bush or a grenade going off underneath a guy, knocking him down, whereupon he looks around, gets up and keeps running. Ugh!
Cool theme song, though.

Yes, Transformers started as a four part mini-series called "More Than Meets the Eye."

By the way, slightly off-topic, but it ties in with Knight Rider... some time ago, I was at a model contest (for model kits, not for fabulous "babes") and saw a 1/25 scale diorama a guy made of a waitress on roller skates admiring KITT. The model of the car was fully detailed inside and out, including full working lights. He even had the right number of red lights pulsating (or whatever the effect was called) at KITT's front end. I believe he won a Best of Show award for the model, or at least top prize in the auto category.

Yep, GI Joe, great show. Until suddenly, about 2/3 of the way through Cobra somehow acquired an 'Emperor'...and the show turned into this weird fantasy-sci-fi-action-adventure hybrid that just turned me right off.


You'll be happy to know that Serpentor was killed off in the comics. Zartan finally got fed up with him and shot him in the face with an arrow!

I know the A-Team was toned down because kids would be watching it and because violence on tv wasn't used like it is now, but logically thinking....

Here's a team of highly trained soldiers, framed for a crime they didn't commit with way to clear themselves and permanently on the run from the law, so why don't they just blow the badguys away?!

I just had a horrible thought. With the proliferation of 'Reality' shows out there I can just imagine, "This Fall on Fox we'll follow these four military men, framed for crimes they didn't commit, as they travel around the country helping people fight bad guys and blowing stuff up!"

I could make a great network executive, if only I didn't have ethics.

Anyone remember Blue Thunder? It was a pretty decent action flick with Roy Scheider, Daniel Stern and Malcolm McDowell as (what else) the bad guy. (It was also the last film Warren Oates made before his death.) It was made into a very short-run series with James Farentino and Dana Carvey. It started the same time as Airwolf, did, but only ran 11 episodes.
I avoided Dukes like the plague. I was usually out on Friday nights. As a lover of classic cars, the thought of wrecking all those very hot and irreplacable 1969 Dodge Chargers (four were wrecked per episode) makes me cringe.

I never watched Blue Thunder, but remember the commercials for both it and Airwolf. On the other hand, I was a loyal watcher of Dukes of Hazzard as a kid.

I did read somewhere that the Dukes Of Hazard production staff were given leaflets to hand out to Charger owners to ask them if they wanted to sell their cars.

Yeah GI Joe was goofy with the "no kill" rule. Transformers was good till the third season. It just went downhill until the end. I guess I just never connected with them taking the majority of the action off the Earth, or with Rodimus Prime. I've seen some of the "4th and beyond" seasons in Japan and it seemed a little better. I will say when they brought Rodimus back he seemed WAY better. I guess Transformers was always about "modern" cars, planes. etc that turn into robots. When they started making "futuristic cars, tractors, sports cars, etc it just kind of lost its appeal. Even now d/ling Transformers eps its hard to watch season 3.

See that was the cool thing about the A-Team. It wasn't an action show, it was a parody of an action show. You were suppose to laugh at how absurd the situation and events were.

Here's an excellent Macgyver site:

http://www.davidhales.net/macgyver/index.html

For KAM from February 12, 2003:

The cowboy show on ABC was titled "Outlaws" starring Rod Taylor ("The Time Machine") as Pat Garrett who was transported from the 1880s to the 1980s by a strange electrical storm. Transported along with him were four members of a gang that included Richard Roundtree ("Shaft") and Charles Naiper (Star Trek, "The Way to Eden", Deep Space Nine, "Little Green Men"). Billy the Kid was also with them, but I can't remember the actor's name. The characters, unfamiliar with their new surroundings, manage to become private detectives/ bounty hunters in order to survive. A local sheriff, played by Christine Belford, discovers who the quintet are and becomes their confidant and police connection. The show was entertaining overall, especially unique for its blending of cowboys and time travel (long before Back to the Future III!). Sadly, like most unique shows it only lasted one season. Most episodes were standard PI detective plots with a Western setting. However, stories highlighted the fish-out-of-water feeling the cowboys had trying to adjust to the modern day. Too bad this interesting hybrid didn't get more of a chance to establish itself.

Wrong show, Captain Video (weren't you on in the '50s?) although now that you mention it I do remember watching that show. Interesting, but I felt the time travel premise was out of sync with the generally down to earth stories.

No, the one I was thinking of had different guys with different skills, a fast draw, a knife thrower, some other abilities I can't remember. Two members of the group were father & son.

For KAM Wednesday, January 14, 2004:

Whoops! Guess that one got by me. "Outlaws" was the only show I could remember that vaguely fit the description. Ah,well...they say omnipotence is overrated anyway...

How about Riptide? Another Steven J. Cannell/Frank Lupo concoction it starred Joe Penny and Perry King as Vietnam war vets working as PIs in Southern California who made frequent use of a Sikorsky S58 helicopter, which as I remember it was painted pink. Thom Bray costarred as their computer hacker friend, and since this was 1984 he was portrayed as a whimpy guy with geeky plastic frame glasses and a bad sense of fashion.

This one contained a classic Cannell/Lupo bit of explosives silliness. I can't remember the actual plot of the episode, but the final confrontation with the baddies occurs on a yacht. When the baddies run into the yacht's cabin our intrepid heros take a grenade, stick in a glass jar, and chuck it into the cabin. The resulting explosion does little more than shake them up. Uhh, right. An exploding grenade, in a confined space, stuck in a glass jar, doesn't turn those around it into several hundred pounds of ground meat. Sorry, but my suspension of disbelief won't go that far.

I think the show you are talking about is "Wildside", with the main characters being the Chamber of Commerce.

http://www.tvtome.com/Wildside/

No, he means Riptide. I distinctly remember that goofy helicopter and the "Robozz" Thom Bray's character invented and which I desperately wanted to own.

I believe S. Donaldson is referring to my post, Mark.

That does sound like the show I remember.

Boy, March 1985 to April 1985, long run. ;-)

I also remember watching Riptide.

Re: Wildside

My mom used to work for the local Chamber of Commerce, and they rarely act like the charaters on Wildside.

Loved Riptide! It took a lot of critical flak but I always thought it was one of the more well-put-together Cannell series - it certainly had more likeable characters.
Thom Bray must have been a huge influence on Bill Gates...seriously, it was fun how the King and Penny characters kept trying to be contemptuous of his computer skills but ended up having to depend on them at the same time.

Only thing that threw me a bit was that the helicopter wasn't only pink, it had a giant red mouth painted on - I think they called it the 'Screaming Mimi'. V. freaky.

I actually liked that chopper. It was so cool to see the Screaming Mimi come runnig at the screen with that giant set of lips there. Very funny. Now looking back at it I find it even funnier since that is basically the same chopper type they used in nam and in Full Metal Jacket.

Great Shows of the 80's

V
Alien Nation
War of the Worlds -Never saw Season One but Season Two rocked!
Werewolf
A Man Called Hawk
The Mission Impossible revival from 88-90 -The pilot had John De Lancie as a Super-assassin.
Amazing Stories -Produced by Steven Spielburg. Started against McGuyver moved to Fridays. My favorite was the one with the teen who found out he was an alien.
NextGen

Hunter "Works for me"
TV Land recently did a rerun which featured Marc Alaimo as a motorcycle cop.

Hunter -- I liked that show (and I *loved* DeeDee! -- Hands off, she's MINE!)

Speaking of Hunter, too bad that the new series didn't work out a couple of years ago. I can see why it didn't, but it would have been nice if it had.

Hey I just noticed something. John Lang has Marina Sirtis/Deanna Troi and ScottN has DeeDee. Maybe we oughta have a board for who has whom.