Danny Bonaduce | Through the Shattered Lens

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, a Partridge leads a Brady into a life of crime!

Episode 2.3 “Family Crisis”

(Dir by Phil Bondelli, originally aired on September 30th, 1978)

Tired of being confined to a police car, Officer Sindy Cahill (Brianne Leary) cannot wait to graduate from motor school so that she can become the Highway Patrol’s first female bike cop. She’s so eager for the job that, when she’s off-duty, she rides around Los Angeles on a motor scooter and occasionally even makes an arrest. Most of the other motorcycle cops are skeptical about Sindy …. because she’s a woman. But Ponch is supportive of Sindy’s ambition …. because she’s a woman who he likes to look at. Ponch spends the majority of this episode standing behind Sindy and leering.

A fancy black Trans Am has been stolen from a movie set and it is being used in a series of robberies. The thieves have made no effort to disguise the car. They didn’t even bother to paint over the very noticeable green racing stripe that, in theory, would make impossible for them to drive around without being spotted. However, it doesn’t matter because the car is so fast and it can do so many fun movie tricks (like covering the street in smoke and oil) that no one can stop it. Sindy has come up with a plan to catch the thieves but Getraer doesn’t want to hear it and we all know why. In fact, when Sindy crashes her car while chasing the thieves, Getraer tells her that she needs to get checked out by the doctors before she goes back on duty. “If I was a man, you’d let me right back out on the street!” Sindy snaps. Sindy knows that Getraer is treating her differently …. because she’s a woman!

Fortunately, Getraer’s boss somehow finds a copy of Sindy’s plan and he decides that it’s brilliant. With both the LAPD and the Highway Patrol working together, they manage to ambush and corner the Trans Am on the Los Angeles docks. The two thieves push the wrong button in the car and they end up getting ejected from their seats and landing in the ocean. Baker and Ponch share a laugh while the two men probably drown.

The two nameless thieves are not the only ones stealing cars. Fred (Danny Bonaduce), a high school senior, is also stealing cars and — oh no! — he’s convinced his friend Wes (Christopher Knight) to go joyriding with him. What Fred didn’t count on was Wes being the nephew of Officer Jon Baker. Baker isn’t going to let anyone corrupt his nephew. When Ponch and Baker eventually catch Fred and Wes and their girlfriends in a stolen car, they put the handcuffs on everyone, even though only Fred is going to be charged with a felony. Baker tells Wes that he put the handcuffs on him to show him where his life is heading. Wes thanks his Uncle Jon and hopefully, he’s learned an important lesson about why the Bradys didn’t hang out with the Partridges.

Finally, Ponch has finally moved out of his RV and into a swinging new apartment! He’s got a view of the pool, so he’s happy. Good for him.

This episode …. actually, this episode wasn’t that bad. I liked Sindy because, if i was waiting to find out if I was going to be a motorcycle cop, I would probably ride around on a motor scooter too. And having Danny Bonaduce leading Christopher Knight astray appealed to me as a student of pop culture. There were some nice chase scenes. The Trans Am was cool. The California scenery was lovely. It was a fun episode.

The 1978 film, Corvette Summer, tells the story of Kenny Dantley (Mark Hamill).

Kenny is a student at a high school in Southern California. He lives in a trailer park and he’s kind of dumb. He’s the type who rarely shows up to class and, when he does, it’s just to discover that he managed to score a D-minus on his last test. Kenny doesn’t think school’s important, though. All Kenny cares about is cars. He doesn’t date. He doesn’t have friends. But he can rebuild a corvette and spend hours talking about why it’s the greatest car in the world.

Yes, Kenny’s an idiot.

Kenny’s auto shop teacher, Mr. McGrath (Eugne Roche), warns Kenny that he’s spending too much obsessing on cars. Don’t fall in love with a car, Mr. McGrath says. A car is just a machine and a machine will always let you down. A machine is something that you build so you can sell it and move on to something else. To me, Mr. McGrath makes sense but Kenny’s like, “No, that’s totally squaresville. Real melvin, man.”

(Well, okay, Kenny doesn’t use those exact words but you can tell that he’s thinking them…..)

Anyway, Kenny and the shop class have just rebuilt a red corvette and Kenny’s convinced that it’s the greatest car ever. However, on the same night that the car makes its debut by cruising down the streets of Kenny’s hometown, it’s stolen! Maybe Kenny shouldn’t have given the keys to Danny Bonaduce. Kenny gets so angry that he smashes a cup of coke and attempts to beat up Bonaduce.

Mr. McGrath tells Kenny that these things happen and he suggests that Kenny instead look into enrolling at a community college after high school. Kenny, however, is too obsessed with finding his car to listen to Mr. McGrath. He even prints up flyers with a picture of the corvette. “Have you seen this car?” the flyers ask. Amazingly, it turns out that someone has. He tells Kenny that he saw the corvette in Las Vegas.

That’s all it takes for Kenny to head to Nevada. Of course, since Kenny doesn’t have a car, he has to hitchhiker. Despite the fact that Kenny looks like a killer hippie and tends to spend a lot of time yelling in a somewhat shrill manner, he’s picked up by Vanessa (Annie Potts). Vanessa is an “aspiring prostitute” who lives in a van. “Vanessa” is written on the side of the van, which means that it will be useless if anyone ever needs to use it as a getaway vehicle for a bank robbery. Way to go, Vanessa.

Once they arrives in Las Vegas, Kenny and Vanessa work a series of different jobs while looking for that corvette. Along the way, Kenny falls in love, discovers that there’s more to life than just cars, and also suffers a bit of disillusionment when one of his mentors turns out to be not as perfect as Kenny originally believed.

Corvette Summer is best known for being Mark Hamill’s first post-Star Wars role. He’s in almost every scene of the film and, to be honest, his performance kind of got on my nerves. Some of that is because, as written, Kenny is almost unbelievably stupid. But Hamill doesn’t help things by giving a rather shrill performance in the lead role. Though the film may be a coming-of-age comedy, Hamill is so intense in the role that he comes across as being less like a naive teenager and more like a mentally unbalanced time bomb. You find yourself hoping that he’ll get the car back before he’s forced to take hostages. Annie Potts is a bit more likable as Vanessa but her character is dreadfully inconsistent. One gets the feeling that she’s mostly just there so that Kenny can finally lose his virginity and be a little bit less of a loser by the end of the movie.

I will say that I did really like the performance of Kim Milford, who plays a superslick car thief named Wayne Lowry. As I watched the film, it took me a few minutes to realize where I recognized Milford from. He was the star of Laserblast, a film that featured Milford finding a laser gun and using it to blow up a sign advertising Star Wars. Milford only has a small role in Corvette Summer and we’re not supposed to like him but he’s so handsome and sure-of-himself that it’s hard not to prefer him to the rather histrionic character played by Mark Hamill.

Corvette Summer is such a film of the 70s that watching it is like stepping into a time machine. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course. Indeed, in 2020, the main appeal of a film like this is a chance to see how people lived in 1978. (It’s always a bit odd to watch a movie where no one carries a phone or has a twitter account.) Watching this film in 2020, it’s hard not cringe a little at the sight of not only Kenny hitchhiking but also people stopping to pick him up. Seriously, are they just trying to get killed?