Late Night Retro Television Review: Highway to Heaven 4.2 “Man’s Best Friend, Part 2”

Posted on June 26, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Highway to Heaven, which aired on NBC from 1984 to 1989. The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi and several other services!

This week, the fourth season premiere concludes.

Episode 4.2 “Man’s Best Friend Part 2”

(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on September 23rd, 1987)

Picking up where last week’s episode, this episode opens with Alex (Danny Pintauro) visiting Jake the Siberian Husky at the big home that Jake shares with Jenny (Elisabeth Harnois), her grandfather (William Schallert), and her parents, Paul (Stan Ivar) and Michelle Raines (Laurie Walters).

Yay!

Alex’s attitude improves so much that it’s decided to move him into a foster home.

Uhmm….what about the Raines family?

The surrogate hired to carry Paul and Michelle’s baby loses the baby. Paul and Michelle are heartbroken.

Uhmm….hey, I think Alex needs a family….

Jenny gives Jake to Alex.

Awwww!

Alex’s foster family lives in a building that doesn’t allow pets.

Oh no!

Alex and Jake run away and, after nearly dying in the desert, they end up with the Raines family’s home.

I see where this is going….

If you guessed that Paul and Michelle announce that they’re going to adopt Alex and that Jake is going to continue to live with them on the ranch, congratulations! You could have been a Highway to Heaven writer!

This episode didn’t make me cry as much as last week’s, mostly because it was pretty easy to see where things were heading from the beginning. Even when Alex and Jake were lost in the desert, I knew they would be okay because this is Highway to Heaven. Children and their adorable dogs don’t die on this show. (Except, of course, for those two times that they did. Actually, three times, now that I think about it.) That said, I was still relieved when Jake was rescued because seriously, that dog was adorable!

This was a good conclusion to last week’s episode. Everything worked out for the best. At the end of the episode, Mark said that he understood why “they call them man’s best friend.” Michael nodded and then said, a little sadly, “Shouldn’t man’s best friend be …. man?”

You tell ’em, Hippie Angel!

You tell them.

Late Night Retro Television Review: Highway to Heaven 4.1 “Man’s Best Friend Part One”

Posted on June 19, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, we start the fourth season of Highway to Heaven. This episode features orphans and dogs! I feel the tears coming….

Episode 4.1 “Man’s Best Friend Part One”

(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on September 16th, 1987)

Oh, this episode made me cry and cry.

Why? Well, for a couple of reasons….

First off, Jonathan and Mark got new jobs working at a kennel. Many of the dogs at the kennel had been abandoned by their owners and Ms. Lil (Fran Ryan) took care of them all, rather than taking them to the pound. And listen, I’m not a dog person. I’m a cat person. We all know this. But seriously, those dogs were adorable!

A Siberian husky named Jake gets lost. After running across the interstate (gasp!), he finds himself alone at night. Coyotes approach. (OH NO!) Suddenly, Jonathan appears and turns into a lion, scaring the coyotes off. (*sniff* *sniff* I’m okay.)

Every few days, Lil takes the dogs down to the local orphanage — (OH MY GOD!) — and lets them play with the orphans. Jake, now a part of the kennel crew, begs young Alex (Danny Pintauro, who had a much worse experience with a dog in Cujo) to play with him. Alex is shy and introverted but Jake quickly becomes his best friend. Alex starts to come out of his shell and says that he knows he’ll never be separated from Jake. For the first time in his young life, Alex is happy.

(Oh dear.)

The local media does a story on Lil and her dogs. They take a picture of Alex and Jake. The next morning, a young girl named Jenny (Elisabeth Harnois) sees the picture and recognizes Jake. For the past month, she’s been desperately looking for Jake!

(This isn’t good….)

Jenny and her grandfather (William Schallert) pick Jake up from the kennel. Jonathan has to go to the orphanage and tell Alex that his best friend is no longer going to be visiting him.

(Sorry, give me a minute.)

Alex is depressed. Jake is depressed. Jonathan shows at Jenny’s home and asks if Alex can come and visit Jake. Jenny and grandpa say yes. (YAY!)

Suddenly, three dreaded words appear on the screen: “TO BE CONTINUED”

What!? No, there’s no need to continue. Alex and Jake have been reunited, let’s end the story here….

This episode was Highway to Heaven at its most earnest, manipulative, and effective. Not only did it feature orphans but also an adorable dog and William Schallert as a genial authority figure. There was also a subplot about Jenny’s parents trying to have another child with a surrogate and I’m sure that has something to do with that promise of “TO BE CONTINUED.”

Nothing better happen to the dog!

Late Night Retro Television Review: CHiPs 2.6 “Trick or Treat”

Posted on June 17, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

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!

It’s a Halloween episode!

Episode 2.6 “Trick or Treat”

(Dir by Phil Bondelli, originally aired on October 21st, 1978)

It’s Halloween in Los Angeles! That means that people will be asking for treats and playing tricks and getting into all sorts of trouble. But, for the California Highway Patrol, it’s just another day and night of trying to keep everyone safe.

Ponch’s day gets off to a bad start when he and Baker chase a van onto a movie lot. The van’s driver, it turns out, was speeding because he was transporting thirteen black cats to a film set. When Ponch and Baker finally pull over the van, the cats get loose and all 13 of them march past Ponch. Later, at headquarters, Ponch is forced by a narrow hallway to walk under a ladder. *GASP* Ponch insists that he’s not superstitious but he also won’t stop talking about his encounter with the black cats.

Ponch is in for some bad luck and it shows up in the form of an 8 year-old named Tommy who squirts Ponch with perfume while Ponch is patrolling the neighborhood. Ponch tells Tommy that playing tricks like that could lead to him getting arrested and hauled off to jail. Tommy panics and runs away from home. Guess who gets the blame for that?

That’s not all that’s going on this Halloween night. (Since this episode aired in 1978, it’s also the night that He came home.) Eddie (Bobby Van) and his girlfriend, Susan (Elaine Joyce), are holding up convenience stores. (Susan distracts the cashiers by wearing a translucent ghost costume.) An older woman (Fran Ryan) is stealing bags of candy from young trick-or-treaters. Paula (Barbara Leigh) and Karen (Jenny Sherman) are stealing speed limit signs as part of a superfun scavenger hunt. And Sgt. Getraer is determined to figure out the identity of the Hobgoblin, a member of the highway patrol who reads macabre poetry over the police radio throughout the night.

Fear not, though …. everything works out in the end. Tommy is not only found hiding out in an abandoned house but Ponch is the one who finds and rescues him. Eddie and Susan get chased and arrested after trying to pull one robbery too many. (Their van crashes as a result of two teenagers throwing eggs on the windshield. Some tricks are good, apparently.) The old woman turns out to be a distraught suburbanite who lost her engagement ring and who thinks that she may have tossed it in some kid’s trick-or-treat bag. (Fortunately, the ring is found in her candy bowl and no one presses charges.) Paula and Karen lose the scavenger hunt but they win future dates with Ponch and Baker. And Getraer figures out that Artie Grossman is the Hobgoblin. In the end, everyone smiles and laugh and that’s the important thing.

For a Halloween episode, Trick or Treat was rather low-key but that’s okay. I liked the day-in-the-life approach that the episode took and it was fun to see that even the members of the fearsome highway patrol were capable of enjoying the holiday. We should have as good a Halloween as Ponch and Baker.

Late Night Retro Television Review: CHiPs 1.15 “Surf’s Up”

Posted on February 19, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, Ponch and Baker hit the beach!

Episode 1.15 “Surf’s Up”

(Dir by Georg Fenady, originally aired on January 19th, 1978)

At the beginning of this week’s episode, Ponch and Baker are miserable.

Los Angeles, the city that they’ve taken an oath to protect, is no longer as friendly as it once was. The highways are congested. The chases are long and tedious. The citizens don’t seem to appreciate the highway patrol’s hard work. When Baker is forced to throw a reckless driver on someone else’s hood in order to arrest him, the owner of the car (Fran Ryan) yells at him for scratching her car and threatens to sue the department.

Ponch and Baker need a break!

At first, Getraer is dismissive of their concerns. He points out, quite sensibly, that he can’t approve their request for a temporary transfer just because they’re having a bad day. They work in Los Angeles and not every day is going to be a perfect day.

“Thanks a lot, pal,” Ponch snaps.

“I’m your sergeant,” Getraer starts, “if you want a pal….”

“Join the Police Athletic League, we know,” Baker says.

Fortunately, for Ponch and John, the Malibu division has a few men who have gotten the flu so Getraer, realizing that he doesn’t want to have to listen to Ponch and Jon whine for a whole week, finally agrees to giving them a temporary transfer.

The rest of the episode follows Ponch and John as they patrol Malibu. It turns out that Malibu has the same problems as Los Angeles but it’s also closer to the beach. (“You can hear the ocean from headquarters!” an excited Ponch says.) Not only do Ponch and Baker stop a car theft (and save the baby who was trapped in the back seat) but they also catch a gang of van thieves. Ponch also takes a few kids from the neighborhood to Disneyland, in order to make up for having incorrectly accused one of them of having stolen a radio and bunch of sunflowers.

Of course, we don’t actually see Ponch at Disneyland. We just hear about afterwards. What we do see is Ponch and Baker hanging out on the beach and trying out a jet ski. As I watched this episode, it occurred to me that CHiPs really wasn’t a police show as much as it was an hour long commercial for California. The theme of this episode appeared to be, “Even if Los Angeles is too crowded and smoggy for you, you can still go to Malibu, meet and date two flight attendants, and conquer the ocean on a jet ski!” And really, this show is at its most effective when it focuses on being a travelogue. I imagine quite a few people watched this episode in 1978 and thought to themselves, “I have to get to Malibu!”

Scenery aside, this is a bit of a dull episode. The van thieves were not particularly impressive villains and even the show’s famous chase scenes felt a bit perfunctory. As a drama, this episode fell flat but it worked wonderfully as a commercial.

A Movie A Day #259: Take This Job And Shove It (1981, directed by Gus Trikonis)

Posted on September 24, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

Originally from a small town in Iowa, Frank Macklin (Robert Hays) is a hotshot young executive with The Ellison Group. When Frank is assigned to manage and revitalize a failing brewery in his hometown, it is a chance for Frank to rediscover his roots. His childhood friends (played by actors like David Keith, Tim Thomerson, and Art Carney) may no longer trust him now that Frank wears a tie but it only takes a few monster truck rallies and a football game in a bar for Frank to show that he is still one of them. However, Frank discovers that the only reason that he was sent to make the brewery profitable was so that his bosses could sell it to a buffoonish millionaire who doesn’t know the first thing about how to run a business. Will Frank stand by while his bosses screw over the hardworking men and women of the heartland? Or will he say, “You can take this job and shove it?”

Named after a country music song and taking place almost entirely in places stocked with beer, Take This Job And Shove It is a celebration of all things redneck. This movie is so redneck in nature that a major subplot involves monster trucks. Bigfoot, one of the first monster trucks, gets plenty of screen time and, in some advertisements, was given higher billing than Art Carney.

A mix of low comedy and sentimental drama, Take This Job And Shove It is better than it sounds. In some ways, it is a prescient movie: the working class frustrations and the anger at being forgotten in a “booming economy” is the same anger that, 35 years later, would be on display during the election of 2016. Take This Job And Shove It also has an interesting and talented cast, most of whom rise above the thinly written dialogue. Along with Hays, Keith, Thomerson, Bigfoot, and Carney, keep an eye out for: Eddie Albert, Royal Dano, James Karen, Penelope Milford, Virgil Frye, George “Goober” Lindsey, and Barbara Hershey (who, as usual, is a hundred times better than the material she has to work with).

One final note: Martin Mull plays Hays’s corporate rival. His character is named Dick Ebersol. Was that meant to be an inside joke at the expense of the real Dick Ebersol, who has the executive producer of Saturday Night Live when Take This Job and Shove It was filmed and who later became the president of NBC Sports?

A Movie A Day #165: Big Wednesday (1978, directed by John Milius)

Posted on June 22, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

If there is a male bonding hall of fame, Big Wednesday has to be front and center.

This episodic movie follows three legendary surfers over twelve years of change and turmoil. Jack Barlowe (William Katt) is the straight arrow who keeps the peace. Leroy “The Masochist” Smith (Gary Busey) is the wild man. Matt Johnson (Jan-Michael Vincent) is the best surfer of them all but he resents both his fame and the expectation that he should be some sort of role model for the younger kids on the beach. From 1962 until 1974, the three of them learn about love and responsibility while dealing with cultural turmoil (including, of course, the Vietnam War) and waiting for that one legendary wave.

After writing the screenplays for Dirty Harry and Apocalypse Now and directing The Wind and The Lion and Dillinger, John Milius finally got to make his dream project. Big Wednesday was based on Milius’s own youth as a California surfer and he has said that all three of the main characters were based on different aspects of his own personality. Expectations for Big Wednesday were so high that Milius’s friends, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, exchanged percentages points for Star Wars and Close Encounters of The Third Kind for a point of Big Wednesday. The deal turned out to be worth millions to Milius but nothing to Lucas and Spielberg because Big Wednesday was a notorious box office flop. Warner Bros. sold the film as a raunchy comedy, leaving audiences surprised to discover that Big Wednesday was actually, in Milius’s words, a “coming-of-age story with Arthurian overtones.”

I can understand why Big Wednesday may not be for everyone but it is one of my favorite movies. It is one of the ultimate guy films. Some of the dialogue and the narration may be overwrought but so are most guys, especially when they’re the same age as the surfers in Big Wednesday. We all like to imagine that we are heroes in some sort of epic adventure. The surfing footage is amazing but it is not necessary to be a surfer to relate to the film’s coming-of-age story or its celebration of the enduring bonds of friendship. Katt, Vincent, and Busey all give great performances. Considering their later careers, it is good that Big Wednesday is around to remind us of what Gary Busey and Jan-Michael Vincent were capable of at their best, before their promising careers were derailed by drugs and mental illness. Be sure to also keep an eye out for infamous 70s character actor Joe Spinell as an army psychiatrist, a pre-Nightmare on Elm Street Robert Englund, playing a fellow surfer and providing the film’s narration, and Barbara Hale, playing the patient mother of her real-life son, William Katt.

One final note: At a time when the shameful stereotype of the psycho Vietnam vet was becoming popular and unfairly tarnishing the reputation of real-life vets, Big Wednesday was unique for featuring a character who not only joins the Army but who appears to return as a better person as a result.

Back to School #29: Private School (dir by Noel Black)

Posted on August 31, 2014 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In my previous two Back To School reviews, I took a look at two classic teen comedies. Fast Times At Ridgemont High and Risky Business both used and manipulated the standard teen comedy trappings to tell unusually nuanced stories about growing up. These are films that used the audience’s familiarity with the genre to tell stories that ultimately challenged the viewer’s preconceived notions and expectations. Having considered those two films, let us now consider Private School, a film that used all of the standard teen comedy clichés to make a very standard teen comedy.

According to the film’s trivia page on the IMDB (how’s that for an authoritative source!?), Private School was “”was supposedly market researched from stem to stern in order to ensure mass teen appeal”. And it’s true because there’s literally nothing in Private School that you couldn’t find in almost every other teen comedy released in the 1980s. In fact, Private School often feels like a compilation of clips from other teen comedies.

For instance, the film tells the story of two groups of three. There’s the three girls who attend Cherryvale Academy: good girl Christine (Phoebe Cates), bad (and rich) girl Jordan (Betsy Russell), and vaguely asexual tomboy Betsy (Kathleen Wilhoite). And then there’s three guys who attend Freemount Academy. There’s a fat guy named Bubba (Michael Zorek), a short guy named Roy (Jonathan Prince) and a nice guy named Jim (Matthew Modine). Bubba is dating Betsy. Christine is dating Jim. Jordan is dating no one because she’s too busy trying to steal Christine’s boyfriend. Roy is also single, largely because adding a fourth girl would throw off the film’s group-of-three dichotomy.

There’s also a lot of boobs, largely because Private School was made to appeal to teenage boys and you really have to wonder how many of them left the theater thinking that all they had to do to get a girl to disrobe was spill some fruit juice on her dress and then suggest that she take it off. There’s even a scene where Jordan rides a horse naked because — well, why not?

And then there’s an extended sequence where each of the three boys puts on a wig, a red dress, way too much lipstick and then sneak into the girl’s dormitory because cross-dressing is always good for a few easy laughs. Despite their best attempts to speak in falsetto voices, Jim, Bubba, and Roy make for three of the least convincing women that I’ve ever seen but, to the film’s credit, that’s kind of the point. It’s a stupid plan that leads to stupid results.

Of course, the film is also full of terrible adult authority figures. And why not? It’s not like anyone over the age of 18 was ever going to watch the film. So, of course, Jordan’s father is going to be lecherous old perv with a trophy wife. And, of course, all of Cherryvale’s teachers are going to be a collection of spinsters and alcoholics. In the end, the only adult who isn’t a raging hypocrite is the friendly town pharmacist (played by Martin Mull) who, of course, is mostly present so he can make Jim feel nervous about buying condoms.

And, ultimately, Private School is one of those films that wants to be racy and dirty (in order to appeal to teenage boys) while also being sweet and romantic (in order to appeal to teenage girls). The main plot revolves around Jim and Christine’s plans to go away for a weekend so that they can have sex for the first time and the film actually handles this pretty well. Matthew Modine and Phoebe Cates both have a really sweet chemistry. They’re a really cute couple and you hope the best for them. But there’s just so many complications, the majority of which could have been avoided by Jim not being an idiot. It never seems to occur to Jim that maybe he’d finally be getting laid if he wasn’t always doing things like dressing up in drag and trying to sneak into the girl’s dormitory.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that Private School is a terrible film. As far as boob-obsessed teen sex comedies go, Private School is actually pretty well-done and watchable. The cast is likable and director Noel Black keeps the action moving. Even the film’s nominal villain is likable, with Betsy Russell playing Jordan as being more mischievous than spiteful. But, ultimately, what makes Private School memorable is the fact that it is so predictable, that it does literally contain every single cliché that one would expect to find in a teen comedy. This is a film so determined to not bring anything new to the genre that it becomes an oddly fascinated study in how to maintain a status quo.

In fact, perhaps the most innovative thing about Private School is the song that plays over the opening credits. The song — which is called You’re Breakin’ My Heart and is performed by Harry Nilsson — starts with: “You’re breaking my heart/you’re tearing it apart/so fuck you…”

That’s about as close to being subversive as Private School ever gets.