John Wesley | 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 Thursdays, I will be reviewing Highway to Heaven, which aired on NBC from 1984 to 1989. The entire show is currently streaming on Freevee and several other services!

This week’s episode was about baseball so guess who I made watch it with me?

Episode 2.7 “Popcorn, Peanuts, and Crackerjacks”

(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on November 13th, 1985)

The Tucson Toros need some help!

The Toros are a minor league baseball team. For years, they have been coached by the kindly Doc Brigsby (Keenan Wynn). When D.W. Rogers (John Milford) purchased the team, one of the first things that he wanted to do was get rid of old Brigsby. But one of the conditions of the sale was that Rogers would retain Brigsby as long as the Toros won more games than they lost. Rogers has been trying to sabotage the team ever since. He’s traded and released all of the team’s best players. The remaining players are dispirited and no longer having fun on the field. It looks like the Toros are about to have their first losing season.

Meanwhile, Ted Tilley (Moses Gunn) is out of a job. Ted was once a pitcher in the Negro Leagues, nicknamed the Louisiana Flash. After he stopped playing, he ran the souvenir stand at the stadium and always made sure to hand out free game tickets to all of the neighborhood kids who did well in school. However, when Rogers signs a contract with a professional vending company, Ted finds himself out-of-work.

Or, at least, he does until two sportswriters named Jonathan Smith and Mark Gordon write an article about the Toros’s bad season. Hoping to generate some positive publicity, Rogers follows a suggestion from Jonathan and signs Ted to the team. Ted makes history as the oldest professional baseball player and teaches the team how to have fun on the field. The Toros suddenly start winning games. But will they win enough to save Brigsby’s job?

Since this episode was about baseball, I got my sister to watch with me. I asked Erin if the episode was, in any way, a realistic portrayal of the game. Erin’s response was to laugh so I’m going to guess that means that most baseball teams would not put an elderly man on the mound as pitcher with the game on the line. Of course, the only reason that Rogers demands that Tilley be put in the game is because he wants the Toros to lose so that he can fire poor old Brigsby. That doesn’t seem like a smart business decision to me but then again, Rogers is typical of the businessmen who appear on this show. He smokes a cigar, he smirks when firing people, and he’s not allowed any sort of redemption.

Myself, I have to wonder just how exactly Jonathan and Mark got jobs as sportswriters. Mark doesn’t even know what their heavenly assignment is until they arrive at the stadium but somehow, within days, Mark and Jonathan’s byline is appearing in the local newspaper. We don’t ever see them get hired by the newspaper or having to deal with any editors. Usually, Mark and Jonathan take blue collar jobs that don’t require them to explain their past employment history or even offer up a list of references. But newspapers generally like to hire actual journalists to report their stories and not drifters who just need a job and a place to crash for a few days. Did the paper ask Jonathan and Mark for references or to see copies of their past work? Did Jonathan break the angel code by lying to the editors? It just seems weird.

Overall, this episode was predictable but heartfelt, in the usual Highway to Heaven fashion. Moses Gunn brough Ted Tilley to wonderful life and it was hard not to be touched by his joy when he struck out a member of the opposing team. Realistic or not, it was a sweet episode.

Goddamn, dude. Chuck Fucking Norris. Even when the movie is terrible, Chuck is cool.

That is especially relevant when it comes to a movie like Missing In Action 2: The Beginning. Produced by Cannon Films and shot back-to-back with the first Missing in Action, The Beginning was supposed to come out first. However, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus took a look at the two movies and realized that The Beginning would work better as the 2nd film in the series. They were right though some post-production tinkering did lead to some serious errors in continuity.

(Not that anyone watching a Golan/Globus production would be worrying about continuity.)

Did you ever wonder how James Braddock (Chuck Norris) became a POW in the first place? No? Missing In Action 2 is going to show you how it happened anyway. It turns out that he and his men were captured, in 1972, by the Viet Cong when their helicopter crashed into a lake. At the start of the movie, Chuck only has a mustache. If Chuck had been fully bearded, there is no way the VC could have captured him. After Chuck and his men have spent ten years in a jungle prison, where they are forced to pick poppies for a French heroin drug lord, Chuck has grown a full beard and is finally strong enough to escape from the prison, rescue his men, and defeat the sadistic camp commandant (Soon-Tek Oh) in hand-to-hand combat. None of it is surprising but there’s enough weird stuff, like the prostitutes that the French drug dealer flies into the camp and the Australian journalist who shows up out of nowhere and is executed ten minutes later, to keep it interesting. Chuck is as stiff as always but he’s good in the action scenes and gets to show off some sweet karate moves towards the end of the movie. Supposedly, Chuck viewed the Missing in Action films as a tribute to his brother, Wieland, who was killed in Vietnam.

The continuity error has to do with the amount of time that Braddock and his men spend in the camp. After Chuck is captured in 1972, the film inserts some footage of Ronald Reagan giving a speech about the men who never returned from Vietnam. A narrator says that the Americans are still wondering what happened to the thousands of soldiers who were reported as being MIA in Vietnam. The implication is that Chuck and company spent ten years in the POW Camp, which means that they escaped in 1982. Since it is said, in Missing in Action, that it has been ten years since Chuck escaped, that means that Missing in Action actually took place in 1992. But if Chuck and the boys escaped and returned to America in 1982 then why, in 1992, was everyone so convinced that all the POWs were released immediately after the Vietnam War?

Fortunately, Chuck Norris is so cool that it doesn’t matter what year it is.

Chuck Norris, man.

Chuck Fucking Norris.