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, Ponch’s mom comes to visit! Will she get on a motorcycle? Uhmm …. no. She doesn’t. It probably would have been cool if she had. She could have helped chase down this week’s set of bad guys. This seems like a missed opportunity. It’s still a good episode, though.
Episode 2.18 “Rally ‘Round The Bank”
(Dir by Barry Crane, originally aired February 3rd, 1979)
Ponch is nervous because his mom, who is deathly afraid of flying, has boarded an airplane and flown from Chicago to Los Angeles to visit him. (In this episode, we discover that Ponch’s family apparently got rich and moved to Chicago sometime between the end of the first and the start of the second season.) Why is Ponch’s mother visiting? Ponch isn’t sure. He spends a lot of time worrying but, in the end, it turns out that his mother (well-played by Anna Navarro, no relation to that annoying woman on The View) came to town because Baker and Getraer called to tell her that Ponch would be receiving a special safety citation from Getraer.
Awwwww!
Apparently, Ponch has gone a whole year without crashing his motorcycle. I’m pretty sure I saw Ponch crash his motorcycle just a few episodes ago but whatever. The important thing is that this is actually a good Ponch episode. For once, Erik Estrada’s tendency to overact is not a distraction and his relationship with his mom is actually really sweet. When I watched this episode, my first thought was that Navarro looked way too young to be Estrada’s mother. If anything, she actually looked like she might be a few years younger than him. Then I checked with imdb and discovered that Navarro actually was sixteen years older than Estrada.
(I will admit that Anna Navarro — again, the actress and not that annoying woman who hosted a day of the Democratic National Convention — reminded me a lot of my own mom, which is maybe one reason why I liked this episode more than I thought I would.)
Ponch and Baker also find time to chase after two bank robbers, played by Frank Ashmore and Ron Hajak. Because the robbers are a part of a nation-wide rally race that is passing through Los Angeles, Ponch and Baker get to know some of the other racers. Two women invite Ponch and Baker to a square dance. Baker has to decline so Ponch brings Getraer instead. Getraer turns out to be a surprisingly good dancer. Ponch’s mom comes to the square dance as well and, for a few minutes, I thought maybe she and Getraer were going to announce to the world that they were in love. That would have been a great CHiPs moment but it didn’t happen. That’s another missed opportunity.
Missed opportunities aside, this was a good episode. It was fun and it was sweet and it made me smile.
Through the Shattered Lens 