Gary Lee Davis | 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 Prime!

This week, there’s a big cat on the loose!

Episode 5.14 “Tiger In The Streets”

(Dir by Charles Bail, originally aired on January 10th, 1982)

Ponch and Baker wonder why someone is digging deep holes in the Los Angeles hills and filling them with raw meat. Could someone by trying to capture a tiger that’s recently gotten loose from a wildlife park? Yes, that’s exactly what’s happening! The owner of the park wants to keep the cops from finding out but, when it turns out that the tiger is a mother and is missing her cubs, only the highway patrol can help Animal Control capture her. Baker likes Stephanie, the Animal Control officer. This is one of the rare episodes where Baker actually gets to have a romance while Ponch stands around and looks awkwardly out-of-place.

As for Ponch, he is more concerned with an ex-con who is at the center of a series of violent confrontations involving various car clubs. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this plot before. CHiPs has been repeating itself a lot during the fifth season. That said, the car chases led to a slow motion wreck and a scene of bouncing hydraulics. I’ve never been in one of those bouncing cars before. It seems like you would get ill riding in one of those.

Finally, Grossie wants to be a comedian. Harlan is a friend of legendary funny man Slappy White. Harlan gives Grossie a bunch of Slappy’s jokes about how black people are different from white people. Needless to say, the jokes don’t go over that well when they’re told be a white guy in a policeman’s uniform.

This episode was silly but I did like the tiger.

This week, Bonnie is taken hostage! It’s good thing Ponch exists because you know no one else on this show is going to able to rescue her.

Episode 4.7 “Satan’s Angels”

(Dir by Phil Bondelli, originally aired on December 14th, 1980)

When confronting a group of outlaw bikers who are harrassing a teenager (Heather Locklear, in her screen debut), Bonnie is kidnapped! Reno (John Quade) manages to snap her own handcuffs on her wrists and then drags her to a cabin owned by Stan (William Smith) and his wife (Candice Azzara).

Can the Highway Patrol find the cabin? The cabin is in the mountains it might not be easy to locate. It’s a good thing that Ponch and Jon just happen have those motorized hang gliders! It’s California living to the rescue! Needless to say, Ponch and Jon (but mostly Ponch) are able to swoop in for the rescue.

This episode didn’t do much for me but then again, episodes about hostage situations rarely do. Once a character is taken hostage, it pretty much causes the action to slow down to a crawl. There’s only so many times you can listen to someone being told not to even think about escaping before it gets kind of boring. This episode did feature the great villainous character actor, William Smith. It had that going for it. But, otherwise, the episode itself moved very slowly and it didn’t help that Bonnie herself was required to make a lot of very stupid mistakes so that she could be kidnapped in the first place. When a show’s storyline depends on a previous competent person suddenly being amazing incompetent, it’s an issue.

This episode’s b-plot featured Getraer’s very pregnant wife continually going the hospital, just to discover it was a false alarm. Getraer’s wife was played Gwynne Gilford who was (and is) married to Robert Pine. Their son, Chris Pine, was born a few months before this episode aired.