Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Mondays, I will be reviewing CHiPs, which ran on NBC from 1977 to 1983. The entire show is currently streaming on Freevee!
This week, Baker gets a dog and Ponch makes an enemy!
Episode 1.3 “Dog Gone”
(Dir by Michael Caffey, originally aired on September 29th, 1977)
When an adorable sheepdog puppy ends up on the Los Angeles highway, Baker and Ponch manage to rescue it, though not before it causes a minor wreck on an overpass. The official CHiP policy is that all stray animals should immediately be turned over to the shelter but Baker takes one look at the puppy and decides that he can’t just leave it with anyone else. In fact, every member of the highway patrol quickly falls in love with the dog.
Everyone except for Sgt. Getraer, who is allergic to dogs and makes it clear that the puppy is not to be kept around the station.
At first, Baker tries to keep the dog in his apartment but it turns out that the dog likes to bark. So, Baker heads out to the trailer park where Ponch lives in an RV and apparently spends all of his time watching football while only wearing his boxer shorts. (One gets the feeling that Erik Estrada had an “at least one shirtless scene per episode” clause in his contract.) Baker leaves the dog in the RV and then runs off before the half-naked Ponch can protest.
Fortunately, for Baker, Ponch decides that he loves the dog, which he named Fido.
Unfortunately, for Ponch, Fido’s owners eventually show up at the station and ask if anyone has seen their dog. The dog — who even I, while admittedly not being a dog person, has to admit is cute — is reunited with his family and I guess Ponch is alone again.
Meanwhile, three really stupid criminals — Boots (Bill Adler), Zero (Jeffrey Druce), and Little John (James Crittenden) — are really angry with Ponch because, at the scene of the earlier accident, Ponch prevented Boots from threatening another motorist. Boots and his friends hops into their dune buggy and decide to stalk Ponch and Baker. Boots even decides to sabotage Ponch’s motorcycle by loosening the front bolt so that the wheel will eventually come off while Ponch is riding it. However, these three criminals are so stupid that they sabotage the wrong motorcycle. As a result, the entire second half of the episode is full of close-ups of Baker’s front tire wobbling as he speeds down the highway.
The subplot with the criminals is really dumb but the way it plays out shows that Larry Wilcox had a point when he complained about the show’s producers always favoring Erik Estrada. Not only is Ponch the one who faces off against Boots at the scene of the accident but he’s also the one who gets to save Baker’s life at the end of the episode. When a guilt-stricken Zero goes to Getraer and tells him about what Boots did to the motorcycle, it doesn’t take long for Getraer to figure out that they accidentally sabotaged Baker’s motorcycle instead of Ponch’s. With Baker unable to hear his radio due to being involved in a high-speed chase, it falls to Ponch to chase after Baker and warn him. The bike still crashes but Baker is not seriously injured and Ponch …. well, Ponch is just a big damn hero!
(Admittedly, there is a scene earlier in the episode where Baker performs mouth-to-mouth recitation on a motorist who has had a heart attack and saves the man’s life. But even then, Ponch is the one pushing on the man’s chest to try to get his heart going again. Baker’s a good cop, the show tells us, but Ponch is a big damn hero.)
This episode …. well, at least the dog was cute! And the California scenery was lovely to look at. Still, a cop show like this needs to have some smart or at least intimidating criminals for the cops to do battle with and Boots was such an idiot that it was hard to take anything he and his gang did seriously. In the end, this was a typical episode of CHiPs, full of stiff acting but impressive motorcycle stunt work. Probably the most interesting thing about this episode was discovering that Baker was the one with a swinging bachelor pad while Ponch was the one living a solitary life in a trailer park. I’m just happy that the dog was reunited with its family.
Through the Shattered Lens 