Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing SLEDGE HAMMER!, a cop comedy which ran on ABC from 1986 to 1988. The entire series can be found on Prime!
This week, the liberal media comes after Sledge Hammer!
Episode 1.2 “Hammer Gets Nailed”
(Dir by Charles Braverman, originally aired on September 26th, 1986)
“HAMMER!” shouts Lt. Trunk as the episode begins.
Trunk is concerned because nosy news reporter Phil Gumm (Ronnie Schell) wants to do a ride along with Sledge Hammer. The Mayor is thinking about laying off a large percentage of the force. (I guess he’s not that grateful to the police for finding his daughter.) If Hammer screws up on camera, that’ll give the Mayor the excuse that he needs. Doreau is assigned to keep Hammer out of trouble.
So, of course, Hammer screws everything up. After forcing a convenience store thief to eat all of the store’s expired food, Hammer gets into a high-speed chase and crashes his car. Phil Gumm ends up with broken arms and a bad attitude. The Mayor promptly starts laying people off …. including Sledge Hammer!
Hammer gets a job as a crossing guard. (He even continues to wear his suit.) However, when a group of terrorists call in a bomb threat, Hammer is the one who heads down to the clock store to try to disarm it. The bomb is ticking. Unfortunately, so is every clock in the store.
“Go Hammer go!” the people watching chant.
“Go bomb go,” Trunk mutters in his office.
Fortunately, Hammer is able to find and disarm the bomb. The store is saved and so is Hammer’s job.
Yay!
This episode wasn’t quite as funny as last week but it still had plenty of laughs. David Rasche delivers his berserk lines with so much earnestness that they actually start to make a strange sort of sense. When Hammer stepped into the store and saw every clock ticking back and forth, I laughed harder than I’ve laughed in a while.
The important thing is that Hammer outsmarted the media.
Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing SLEDGE HAMMER!, a cop comedy which ran on ABC from 1986 to 1988. The entire series can be found on Prime!
My friend Pat McCurry introduced me to Sledge Hammer earlier this year. Starring David Rasche as Detective Sledge Hammer, this show was a parody of Dirty Harry and Hunter. Since I’m currently reviewing Hunter on Thursday night, it seems only appropriate to review Sledge Hammer on Friday night!
Episode 1.1 “Under the Gun
(Dir by Martha Coolidge, originally aired on September 23rd, 1986)
“HAMMER!” shouts police Captain Trunk (Harrison Page), “YOU COULDN’T RESIST BLOWING UP A BUILDING ON YOUR WAY TO WORK THIS MORNING, COULD YOU!?”
Captain Trunk yells a lot but that’s just because he’s been put in charge of managing Detective Sledge Hammer (David Rasche), a San Francisco cop who talks to his gun and who is currently on suspension for shooting a robber at a grocery store before then buying some eggs and “those little cocktail weenies.” When asked by a reporter if his response was too violent, Hammer replied that he really needed his groceries.
For the record, Trunk is correct. Hammer did blow up a building on his way to work. There was a sniper on the roof so Hammer pulled a rocket launcher out of the back of his car and took care of the problem.
Despite all of that, the mayor (John Vernon, who previously played San Francisco’s mayor in Dirty Harry) orders that Sledge Hammer be taken off suspension. The Mayor’s daughter, Francie (Judie Aronson), has disappeared. (“She was either kidnapped or she is just very good at hiding.”) The police think that she was taken by the Allied Violent Offence Network (AVON), a terrorist group led by Weird Willy Luxley (D.W. Brown). Weird Willy is so evil that his own parents gave him up for adoption three years before he was born. The Mayor thinks that Sledge Hammer’s unapologetic embrace of violence is the way to go.
Hammer is assigned a partner, Dori Doreau (Anne-Marie Martin), an expert in negotiation and criminal psychology. At first, Hammer is uneasy about working with a woman. But, when he sees her beat up a man with a shotgun, he’s impressed. “That was excessively violent and totally unnecessary. I loved it.” Doreau mentions she was at the top of her class in hand-to-hand combat. “I’d like to fight you sometimes, Doreau,” Hammer replies.
Hammer promises to bring back “the mayor’s daughter, dead or alive.” Reasoning that it’s usually a member of the family who is to blame in cases like this, Hammer arrests and interrogates the Mayor’s wife. That gets Hammer suspended again but it turns out that Hammer was half-right. It wasn’t the Mayor’s wife. Instead, in true Patty Hearst manner, it turns out that Francie Flambo is a member of AVON and she arranged her own kidnapping!
It all leads to a shootout in a warehouse, as these things often do. When AVON makes their ransom demand, Doreau is sent to deliver the money. (She’s actually given a suitcase full of shredded paper.) Sledge Hammer crashes through a skylight and lands on a box, grinning.
“Why are you smiling!?” Weird Willie Luxley demands.
“I’m trigger happy, that’s why!” Hammer replies.
Soon, all of the members of AVON have been subdued and Francie has been arrested. The Mayor offers Doreau a promotion but Doreau refuses to accept it because she feels that Hammer is not being given the recognition that he deserves.
This seems like the start of a beautiful friendship.
The first episode of Sledge Hammer may be 40 years old but it’s still feels relevant and the laughs still feel earned. As played by David Rasche, Sledge Hammer is the perfect parody of every unapologetically violent action hero. Though there are hints of attraction between him and Doreau, the episode makes it pretty clear that Hammer’s true love is for his gun. At the same time, there’s something rather refreshing about Hammer’s total and complete lack of angst. As I watched this episode, it occurred to me that Hammer would probably get as annoyed with Daniel Craig’s self-pitying version of James Bond as I do.
This pilot was enjoyable and funny 26 minutes of pure entertainment. I look forward to reviewing the rest of the series!
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, Jonathan meets a man who is desperate for money.
Episode 3.20 “The Hero”
(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on February 18th, 1987)
In desperate need of dental work that the VA refuses to pay for, disabled Vietnam veteran Joe Mason (James Stacy) considers stealing money from work and spends his time getting drunk and getting into fights in parking lots. Luckily, Jonathan is his new coworker and is able to show Joe that he truly deserve to be called a hero.
This was a standard Highway to Heaven episode but some people will find it interesting just because it features James Stacy. Stacy was the former star of the western series Lancer, the one that played a central role in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. (In that film, Stacy is played by Timothy Olyphant.) In real life, Stacy lost both his left arm and his left leg when he was hit by a drunk driver while he was riding his motorcycle. (Stacy’s girlfriend at the time was killed.) Stacy continued to act, appearing in roles, like this one, that were specifically written to include his disability. Stacy was nominated for a few Emmy Awards after his accident and he gives a good performance in this episode.
Unfortunately, James Stacy’s career did not have a happy ending, as he struggled with alcoholism after the accident. He retired from acting in 1991 and four years later, he pled “no contest” to inappropriately touching an 11 year-old girl. (I’ve come across a lot of different version of what happened, with some saying it was a misunderstanding and others saying that it definitely wasn’t. What everyone does seem to agree on is that Stacy was drunk at the time.) Due in court in California, Stacy instead fled to Hawaii where he attempted to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff, just for the wind to slam him into a ledge below. Stacy, who had been looking at probation, was instead sent to prison for six years. After his release, Stacy lives in seclusion until his 2016 death.
Stacy’s appearance on this episode is another example of Highway to Heaven giving work to veteran actors who were not necessarily working on a regular basis. In many ways, this show was like The Love Boat or Fantasy Island, in that its guest cast leaned heavy on nostalgia. Landon was a Hollywood veteran himself and one gets the feeling that one of his main motivations for doing this show was to help out his friends and acquaintances, the ones who weren’t necessarily at the top of Hollywood’s casting list anymore. The use of so many veteran actors, even someone who eventually became rather problematic like James Stacy, just adds to the earnestness that was this show’s defining characteristic.
One of the best films ever made about Vietnam is also one of the least known.
Go Tell The Spartans takes place in 1964, during the early days of the Vietnam War. Though the Americans at home may not know just how hopeless the situation is in South Vietnam, Major Barker (Burt Lancaster, in one of his best performances) does. Barker is a career military man. He served in World War II and Korea and now he’s ending his career in Vietnam, taking orders from younger superiors who have no idea what they are talking about. Barker has been ordered to occupy a deserted village, Muc Wa. Barker knows that occupying Muc Wa will not make any difference but he is in the army and he follows orders.
Barker sends a small group to Muc Wa. Led by the incompetent Lt. Hamilton (Joe Unger), the group also includes a drug-addicted medic (Dennis Howard), a sadistic South Vietnamese interrogator (Evan C. Kim) who claims that every civilian that the men meet is actually VC, a sergeant (Jonathan Goldsmith) who is so burned out that he would rather commit suicide than take command, and Cpl. Courcey (Craig Wasson). Courcey is a college-educated idealist, who joined the army to do the right thing and is now about to discover how complicated that can be in South Vietnam. At Muc Wa, the soldiers find a cemetery containing the graves of French soldiers who died defending the hamlet during the First Indochina War. The inscription as the cemetery reads, “Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.”
Because the film strives for realism over easy drama, Go Tell The Spartans has never gotten the same attention as some other Vietnam films. Unlike The Deer Hunter, Platoon, Coming Home, and Born on the 4th of July, Go Tell The Spartans received no Oscar nominations. It is still a brilliantly acted and powerful anti-war (but never anti-soldier) film. It starts out as deceptively low-key but the tension quickly builds as the soldier arrive at Muc Wa and discover that their orders are both futile and impossible to carry out. Vastly outnumbered, the Americans also find themselves dealing with a land and a culture that is so unlike their own that they are often not even sure who they are fighting. Military discipline, as represented by Lt. Hamilton, is no match for the guerilla tactics of the VC. By the film’s end, Vietnam is revealed to be a war that not even Burt Lancaster can win.
One of the best films ever made about Vietnam is also one of the least known.
Through the Shattered Lens 