Kedric Wolfe | 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, season 3 comes to an end.

Episode 3.24 “Dynamite Alley”

(Dir by Bruce Kessler, originally aired on March 30th, 1980)

After testifying in a trial in Bakersfield, Bonnie (Randi Oakes) is driving back to Los Angeles when, somehow, she ends up flipping her squad car. In the hospital, Bonnie swears that she had to swerve suddenly to avoid a truck that came out of nowhere. The only witness to Bonnie’s accident is a pre-adolescent named Corey (Bryan Scott), who was watching as Bonnie drove by his house. Corey says that he saw the truck but Ponch and Jon come to suspect that he might be lying because he doesn’t want Bonnie to get in trouble. Meanwhile, Grossman is writing an article on how tired drivers can hallucinate seeing other vehicles and he comes to suspect that this is what happened to Bonnie.

And he’s right! It’s interesting that, just last season, CHiPs did an entire episode about proving that Sindy Cahill was not responsible for a crash she was involved with. Meanwhile, this season ends with an episode that’s all about Bonnie being a menace on the streets. Of course, event though Bonnie flipped her car after imagining seeing a truck in front of her, she gets to keep her job and everyone has a good laugh about it.

My main issue with this episode is that Corey was 1) portrayed as having a stutter and 2) nicknamed Blabbermouth by everyone he knew, even the characters who were supposed to be sympathetic to him. When he showed up in the hospital to confess that he didn’t really see a truck push Bonnie off the road, Bonnie replies, “Oh, Blabbermouth.” Even Jon and Ponch call him Blabbermouth. As a former stutterer, this episode really annoyed me.

As for our B-plot, the “funny car show” is in town. All sorts of weird vehicles show up on the streets. One man tries to drive a tank to the show and people start throwing bottles at him. When Baker and Ponch show up to investigate the tank, Baker nearly gets hit by a glass bottle that’s thrown at him by two kids. Ponch grabs one of the kids but then just laughs and lets him leave. Really, Ponch? BAKER COULD HAVE LOST AN EYE!

And that’s how the third season ended, with Bonnie crashing her squad car because she had a hallucination and a poor kid with a stutter being called “Blabbermouth” by the police. That’s not the best way to end a season.

Season 4 starts next week!

Sheriff Hugh “Smokey” Turner (Walter Barnes) of Cyco County, Arkansas is determined to capture teenage car thief and prankster, Roscoe Wilton (Jimmy McNichol). Roscoe is determined to disrupt the high school homecoming dance by abducting the homecoming queen, Peggy Sue (Janet Julian). Peggy Sue is, at first, determined to escape from Roscoe but changes her mind as they flee from her father, who just happens to be Sheriff Turner.

From producer Roger Corman, Smokey Bites The Dust is an 88-minute car chase film where the most spectacular getaways and crashes are lifted from other Roger Corman productions. Eagle-eyed viewers will spot footage from Eat My Dust, Grand Theft Auto, and Moving Violations. In order to explain why the cars keep changing from scene to scene, the chase moves from county-to-county where both Roscoe and Sherriff Turner inevitably end up ditching (or crashing) their old car and then stealing a new vehicle to continue the pursuit.

That’s not much of a plot so the run time is padded out with several subplots. A local moonshiner tries to sell his special brew to a group of Arabs. Peggy Sue’s boyfriend, Kenny (William Forsyth, in one of his first films), joins in the chase. Dick Miller flies around in a helicopter and also gets involved in the chase. None of it makes any sense and none of it is particularly amusing but Roger Corman undoubtedly made a lot of money pushing this thing into Southern drive-ins and letting people assume it was some sort of a sequel to Smokey and the Bandit.

Most of the acting is pretty bad. When it comes to being an incompetent sheriff, Walter Barnes is no Jackie Gleason. Jimmy McNichol comes across as being seriously disturbed. Of the main cast, Janet Julian is alone in giving an appealing and naturalistic performance as Peggy Sue. While Julian (who has since retired from acting) never became the star she deserved to be, she is remembered for her later turn as Christopher Walken’s lawyer and girlfriend in 1990’s King of New York.