Made in 1985 for CBS, Ace Hits The Big Time is a seriously strange little film.

It tells the story of Horace Hobart (Rob Stone, a likable actor), a 16 year-old kid from New Jersey who has just transferred to a new high school in New York.  He’s paranoid about going to his new school because it’s supposedly populated by gang members.  The school is so notorious for gang activity that the members of the gang even make an appearance on the front page of the paper of record, The New York Freaking Times!  Looking at the newspaper makes Horace Hobart so paranoid that he has musical fantasies in which the members of a gang known as the Purple Falcons surround him, start singing, and then beat him up while doing an interpretive dance.

Horace does eventually find the courage to go to his new high school but he insists on calling himself “Ace,” he wears a jacket with a fearsome dragon embroidered on the back of it, and he wears an eye patch because he’s got …. ewwww …. pink eye.  (Remember when Bob Costas got pink eye at the Olympics and traumatized thousands of viewers by insisting on going on the air every night and talking about snowboarding while struggling to keep his eye from popping out of its socket?  Those were crazy times!)  Ace looks so tough that the real Purple Falcons mistake him for being an associate of a notorious New Jersey gang (no, not the Sopranos) and they recruit him to be a member of their gang.  Ace is so convincing as a tough guy that a film crew decides to use him and his friends as extras in a movie!  (Interestingly, the director is really involved in picking and working with the extras.  There’ll be no second unit crap for Ace and the Purple Falcons!)  Unfortunately, another gang insists on trying to make the Purple Falcons look bad.  Fortunately, Ace is able to defuse the tension by baking a cake.  What?

This is like the dorkiest version of West Side Story ever made and I can’t really figure out what the message is supposed to be.  On the one hand, Ace is totally paranoid about any sort of gang violence and goes out of his way to try to prevent a gang war.  On the other hand, even before Ace shows up and starts quoting John Lennon, neither one of the show’s gangs are particularly violent or even intimidating.  The Purple Falcons are pretty much impossible to take seriously because they’re called “the Purple Falcons.”  (They all wear purple, as well.  I guess some other gang had already claimed all the cool falcon colors.)  They really don’t do any sort of “gang” stuff.  Instead, they eat a lot of pizza and appear in a movie.  That sounds like a pretty good deal, actually.  With its mix of dorky humor, random dance numbers, and “tough” gang talk, this is one of those old time capsules that simply has to be seen to be believed.

And here it is!