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. . . or, if you prefer, watch or rewatch more of the episodes on Hulu.
I loved this show when it first aired, 1981–83. Strangely, though, I gave it only occasional thoughts until they announced the death of Robert Culp in March. I could not believe Culp had died; for me, he'd stayed Bill Maxwell, in his 50s, since I last saw the show in 1983, though I'd seen the occasional picture of him later.
And that's the beauty of it: Bill Maxwell is forever. I was a little afraid to watch again; watching other childhood favorites like Lost in Space and the original Battlestar Galactica ruined those shows for me. I pretty sure I'm laughing at different bits now on GAH, but I'm still laughing! I still love all three of the main characters. We seem finally to have found a show that we can all enjoy together, and which has lots of episodes.
(Isn't "GAH" the most appropriate abbreviation for a show ever? I think at least two of the characters make sounds like that on a regular basis!)
So I hope some of you will follow me down memory lane, or avail yourselves of the fact that nearly all the episodes are on Hulu, and share some fond memories that I've recently renewed by starting the series once again! In order, with spoilers for each:
The pilot, 'Greatest American Hero', is not available on Hulu or Netflix Instant Queue. (Aurora thinks this may be due to rights issues with one or more of the songs used.)
I thought I remembered the pilot. Wow, was there a lot I didn't remember!
I did not recall how Bill met Ralph and the kids. Bill's partner is already missing, and probably presumed dead, when Ralph brings the busload of kids to a diner in or near the desert. Tony starts hassling the guy sitting alone at the counter, the guy at the counter talks back—and Tony draws a knife, but in the same instant Bill pulls his gun. Holy cow! Ralph takes the knife from Tony, and Bill lets it go (doubtless distracted by worry over his partner). We watched the extras on a later disk, and Michael Paré talked about doing that scene. He was new to acting but had watched I Spy, and here he was filming opposite Robert Culp, and he didn't quite realize that Culp was going to pull a loaded gun on him! He said he could see the bullets, and he thought, "I saw this guy shoot people on I Spy!" and nearly peed himself, he was so scared!
I had also forgotten how unlikeable Bill is when it all starts! Ralph meets Bill the second time when his school bus dies in the desert because of the little green guys. Ralph goes for help, and Bill nearly hits Ralph when he loses control of the car right before his car dies too. Bill is obviously drunk at the time. Then the green guys appear, and Bill sees his dead partner. Bill says goodbye to John Mackie* in a surprisingly moving scene (to me, anyway!). Then Bill freaks out and drives off, stranding Ralph a mile from the bus again, in the desert, at night. Ralph yells "Jerk!" after him, which hardly begins to cover it.
*Did they pair these guys alphabetically? "Mackie, you go with Maxwell!"
The next morning, Ralph's principal tells him to get the drunk out of the men's room on the second floor. Bill has apparently stopped drinking just long enough to puke; Ralph fishes a liquor bottle out of the trash in the course of their next fight, in which Ralph says that he has the suit and they'll do things his way, or "I'll turn you into 170 pounds of dog meat!" Wow. I didn't actually remember Ralph coming off that way either! Bill stops arguing then. He's not completely stupid.
The humor really takes off with Pam, who has done nothing to deserve any of this but now has a boyfriend in a supersuit who has acquired an informal FBI partner who drives her nuts from the get-go. Pam is brilliant. Aside from one brief fainting episode (writers, please, no), she handles the whole thing really, really well! I love that she sticks with Ralph even when she thinks he's nuts; she loyally comes to the hospital where he has been brought as a mental case. She even accepts Ralph when he seems determined to stay with the FBI Jerk! Connie Sellecca has great reaction faces.
Not a bad pilot; in fact, it has a harder edge than much of the series! It's still pretty darned funny, though.
It's not about the plot. It's about the people. And I love these people.
"The Hit Car" is the first episode available on Hulu and Netflix Instant Queue. If you can't get the pilot, just start here. You don't really need that much background. (If you do, ask in comments! I'll be happy to tell you everything you need to know!)
I find this episode screamingly funny, which is a little sick. The whole thing relies on a bloophole you could drive the Destiny through, and you know what? I'm laughing so hard I don't really care. It makes no sense for Johnny to set up Bill by pretending Scarlet is going to testify against him and needs protection. It's not hard to find where Bill lives and works. Just shoot the guy, okay? Don't make him expect to be shot at first, plus make yourself a major suspect. There must be lots of people who want Bill Maxwell dead, so a killing that hasn't raised your name in the process would be a lot safer.
What disturbs me is not just that I laugh at Bill's injuries, but how much I laugh. I'm pretty darned sure I'm supposed to, but why is this so funny?
The kids doing Shakespeare at the start and end made me laugh. Pam's glares at and retorts to Bill are priceless. Bill and the dog biscuits—man, I've been scouring the Internet for a screencap of Bill holding a box of dog biscuits that's clearly visible as such, but I haven't got it yet. When I do, I'll make a new userpic. (If anyone knows where to find one, please point me there! I know from extras on that other DVD that he has them in other episodes; I'll get there eventually.)
The scene that takes the cake is the injured Bill—shot in the left hand, shot in the right foot, and face lacerated by flying glass—limping through a restaurant to dump pasta and wine in the lap of the tuxedo-clad Mafioso. (It was a horrible tuxedo, but it was 1981.) Bill is completely, frighteningly manic. He's excessively cheerful and yet scarily intense as he provokes Johnny to come after him personally. Then he limps out to the car, tells Ralph nothing about what he has just done but asks him to drive, and ignores everything Ralph says to him as they drive to the school. He's watching in the side-view mirror for the tail he knows they've picked up, but he doesn't say anything about that, either. He doesn't realize there are people at the school (on break) because he has been not listening for so long! Meanwhile, Ralph delivers a near-monologue where he doesn't quite get that Bill isn't listening, but it seems to make Ralph feel better! These actors are brilliant.
It comes out in the interviews on the disk with the extras that William Katt did not get along with Robert Culp for the first couple or three weeks of shooting. Katt was a serious stage actor. The poor man went into the bathroom to try on the suit when he first got it, and he came out in shock, not wearing the suit. He told Cannell he could not put it on; he would look ridiculous, and it would end his career. He'd barely recovered from that when this veteran actor kept insisting on running scenes with him and working out details. As Culp said, it took Katt a little while to realize he wasn't trying to steal scenes for his own character, but make them work as well as they could. (Katt says he went to Culp's trailer to have it out with him, but he didn't say much about what happened there.) It's clear enough from the interviews that they both had very strong personalities and ideas of how they were going to do their scenes! I think they really used that tension to fuel their onscreen relationship, and it works beautifully.
"The Hit Car" has to be my favorite episode so far in rewatch.
"Here's Looking at You, Kid"
Ralph accidentally discovers the suit's invisibility powers! Sadly, it takes him a while to master them. This one is painfully funny—or sometimes just painful. It has multiple bloopholes: why does Ralph have to walk through the restaurant in the suit once he reappears and can't disappear again, when there's an Exit sign right at the back, out of sight? (Brilliant Husband spotted that one.) More to the point, why doesn't he just take off the suit? It doesn't pay to ask plot questions with this show.
We meet Pam's parents and wonder how Pam ever turned out as well as she did. June Lockhart plays Pam's mom! Poor Pam! Yes, it makes all three of their lives more difficult, but Pam gets no real benefit out of the suit.
"Saturday Night on Sunset Boulevard"
Wherein our unlikely team, combined with Ralph's class of underachievers, rescue a Russian defector and his Italian lover; and Bill fails a lie detector test on the last question, "Has anything unusual happened to you in the last six months?"
Not the most brilliant episode, it combines After-School Special wisdom ("Wow, Ms. Davidson! I never thought someone could find brains sexy!") with a few great moments. My favorites are Bill hanging up on the kidnappers and pulling the phone cord so Ralph can't pick back up. "Deal from strength," he tells Ralph. (I nearly wrote that phrase in an e-mail to a grad student recently, but I couldn't face either properly attributing it or leaving it unattributed when I knew I was quoting Bill Maxwell, so I reworded). Later Bill pretended that he has done the same thing with the bureau chief, when in fact he ended the conversation on a supplicating note and only started yelling into the phone after the other man had hung up. I also loved Pam deciding to try to be a hero herself. Pushing the dumpster in the way of the car with the bad guys and their kidnap victims was a good idea, Pam! Standing around to see the results was not!
"Reseda Rose" is also great fun. We see Rhonda's mother, who's a hoot; I wouldn't have minded seeing more of her. The episode also features wonderful interactions among the main cast. Ralph's ex-wife turns up: my favorite scene is probably the one where Bill keeps responding to her with snarky remarks for Ralph's benefit, and Alicia simply pretends not to hear him. Much of the verbal humor in this show comes from people talking past each other or simply not listening.
Ralph annoys Bill by pretending to have a "holograph" and speaking faux Russian when he's really getting nothing. Katt proves again that he's great at physical humor when he puts on someone else's suit over his jammies so Rhonda's mom won't see the suit, and the pants keep falling down. It's basic vaudeville, but he makes it funny. (Small Child enjoyed these parts much more than we did; I bet I did when I first saw the episode, too.) Pam has to put up with these crazy people!
"My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys" features Bill and Ralph having separate crises about what a hero is. Ralph's attempts to stop bad guys nearly result in disasters for innocent people, twice, and Ralph puts the suit away. Bill's hero, his unit captain from Korea, is a cop gone bad; Bill veers between certainty that Trace is about to commit a major crime and certainty that he's wronged the man just thinking so. John Hart appears as himself: one of the two actors who played The Lone Ranger in the old tv show. It's cheesy, but I really did feel for both Ralph and Bill. I love that Pam and Ralph decide to back up Bill even when Bill has pretty much convinced himself that he's wrong. I also like Ralph's little speech about how scared he was when the shooting started and he wasn't wearing he suit, and he doesn't understand how Bill can do this all the time. (And Ralph suiting up right there in Bill's apartment—hey, the guy is cute!)
We get to see where Bill lives: the Murphy bed in the little apartment, the maps on the walls, the gun rack next to the door. Somebody needs a life! Then there's Bill opening the door in shorts, a sleeveless shirt, and the double holster, when he's clearly hung over and not quite functioning right—I don't think I actually needed to see that.
Great line: early in the episode, Tracy Morgan tells Bill, "Pressure makes diamonds." Later, Bill tells Ralph, "Pressure makes diamonds—George Patton." (According to the Internet, Patton really did say it. Of course, you should see what the Internet thinks John Lennon said.)
I love how excited Bill gets when they're going to catch the bad guys; he never really did grow up. He's still a little kid at heart playing cops and robbers, but with live ammo. I love how Ralph sometimes gets excited and happy—and sometimes, it's just because he's amused at seeing Bill so excited! Poor Pam gets left out of that a little, but when it comes to insults, she gives as good as she ever gets!
I loved this show when it first aired, 1981–83. Strangely, though, I gave it only occasional thoughts until they announced the death of Robert Culp in March. I could not believe Culp had died; for me, he'd stayed Bill Maxwell, in his 50s, since I last saw the show in 1983, though I'd seen the occasional picture of him later.
And that's the beauty of it: Bill Maxwell is forever. I was a little afraid to watch again; watching other childhood favorites like Lost in Space and the original Battlestar Galactica ruined those shows for me. I pretty sure I'm laughing at different bits now on GAH, but I'm still laughing! I still love all three of the main characters. We seem finally to have found a show that we can all enjoy together, and which has lots of episodes.
(Isn't "GAH" the most appropriate abbreviation for a show ever? I think at least two of the characters make sounds like that on a regular basis!)
So I hope some of you will follow me down memory lane, or avail yourselves of the fact that nearly all the episodes are on Hulu, and share some fond memories that I've recently renewed by starting the series once again! In order, with spoilers for each:
The pilot, 'Greatest American Hero', is not available on Hulu or Netflix Instant Queue. (Aurora thinks this may be due to rights issues with one or more of the songs used.)
I thought I remembered the pilot. Wow, was there a lot I didn't remember!
I did not recall how Bill met Ralph and the kids. Bill's partner is already missing, and probably presumed dead, when Ralph brings the busload of kids to a diner in or near the desert. Tony starts hassling the guy sitting alone at the counter, the guy at the counter talks back—and Tony draws a knife, but in the same instant Bill pulls his gun. Holy cow! Ralph takes the knife from Tony, and Bill lets it go (doubtless distracted by worry over his partner). We watched the extras on a later disk, and Michael Paré talked about doing that scene. He was new to acting but had watched I Spy, and here he was filming opposite Robert Culp, and he didn't quite realize that Culp was going to pull a loaded gun on him! He said he could see the bullets, and he thought, "I saw this guy shoot people on I Spy!" and nearly peed himself, he was so scared!
I had also forgotten how unlikeable Bill is when it all starts! Ralph meets Bill the second time when his school bus dies in the desert because of the little green guys. Ralph goes for help, and Bill nearly hits Ralph when he loses control of the car right before his car dies too. Bill is obviously drunk at the time. Then the green guys appear, and Bill sees his dead partner. Bill says goodbye to John Mackie* in a surprisingly moving scene (to me, anyway!). Then Bill freaks out and drives off, stranding Ralph a mile from the bus again, in the desert, at night. Ralph yells "Jerk!" after him, which hardly begins to cover it.
*Did they pair these guys alphabetically? "Mackie, you go with Maxwell!"
The next morning, Ralph's principal tells him to get the drunk out of the men's room on the second floor. Bill has apparently stopped drinking just long enough to puke; Ralph fishes a liquor bottle out of the trash in the course of their next fight, in which Ralph says that he has the suit and they'll do things his way, or "I'll turn you into 170 pounds of dog meat!" Wow. I didn't actually remember Ralph coming off that way either! Bill stops arguing then. He's not completely stupid.
The humor really takes off with Pam, who has done nothing to deserve any of this but now has a boyfriend in a supersuit who has acquired an informal FBI partner who drives her nuts from the get-go. Pam is brilliant. Aside from one brief fainting episode (writers, please, no), she handles the whole thing really, really well! I love that she sticks with Ralph even when she thinks he's nuts; she loyally comes to the hospital where he has been brought as a mental case. She even accepts Ralph when he seems determined to stay with the FBI Jerk! Connie Sellecca has great reaction faces.
Not a bad pilot; in fact, it has a harder edge than much of the series! It's still pretty darned funny, though.
It's not about the plot. It's about the people. And I love these people.
"The Hit Car" is the first episode available on Hulu and Netflix Instant Queue. If you can't get the pilot, just start here. You don't really need that much background. (If you do, ask in comments! I'll be happy to tell you everything you need to know!)
I find this episode screamingly funny, which is a little sick. The whole thing relies on a bloophole you could drive the Destiny through, and you know what? I'm laughing so hard I don't really care. It makes no sense for Johnny to set up Bill by pretending Scarlet is going to testify against him and needs protection. It's not hard to find where Bill lives and works. Just shoot the guy, okay? Don't make him expect to be shot at first, plus make yourself a major suspect. There must be lots of people who want Bill Maxwell dead, so a killing that hasn't raised your name in the process would be a lot safer.
What disturbs me is not just that I laugh at Bill's injuries, but how much I laugh. I'm pretty darned sure I'm supposed to, but why is this so funny?
The kids doing Shakespeare at the start and end made me laugh. Pam's glares at and retorts to Bill are priceless. Bill and the dog biscuits—man, I've been scouring the Internet for a screencap of Bill holding a box of dog biscuits that's clearly visible as such, but I haven't got it yet. When I do, I'll make a new userpic. (If anyone knows where to find one, please point me there! I know from extras on that other DVD that he has them in other episodes; I'll get there eventually.)
The scene that takes the cake is the injured Bill—shot in the left hand, shot in the right foot, and face lacerated by flying glass—limping through a restaurant to dump pasta and wine in the lap of the tuxedo-clad Mafioso. (It was a horrible tuxedo, but it was 1981.) Bill is completely, frighteningly manic. He's excessively cheerful and yet scarily intense as he provokes Johnny to come after him personally. Then he limps out to the car, tells Ralph nothing about what he has just done but asks him to drive, and ignores everything Ralph says to him as they drive to the school. He's watching in the side-view mirror for the tail he knows they've picked up, but he doesn't say anything about that, either. He doesn't realize there are people at the school (on break) because he has been not listening for so long! Meanwhile, Ralph delivers a near-monologue where he doesn't quite get that Bill isn't listening, but it seems to make Ralph feel better! These actors are brilliant.
It comes out in the interviews on the disk with the extras that William Katt did not get along with Robert Culp for the first couple or three weeks of shooting. Katt was a serious stage actor. The poor man went into the bathroom to try on the suit when he first got it, and he came out in shock, not wearing the suit. He told Cannell he could not put it on; he would look ridiculous, and it would end his career. He'd barely recovered from that when this veteran actor kept insisting on running scenes with him and working out details. As Culp said, it took Katt a little while to realize he wasn't trying to steal scenes for his own character, but make them work as well as they could. (Katt says he went to Culp's trailer to have it out with him, but he didn't say much about what happened there.) It's clear enough from the interviews that they both had very strong personalities and ideas of how they were going to do their scenes! I think they really used that tension to fuel their onscreen relationship, and it works beautifully.
"The Hit Car" has to be my favorite episode so far in rewatch.
"Here's Looking at You, Kid"
Ralph accidentally discovers the suit's invisibility powers! Sadly, it takes him a while to master them. This one is painfully funny—or sometimes just painful. It has multiple bloopholes: why does Ralph have to walk through the restaurant in the suit once he reappears and can't disappear again, when there's an Exit sign right at the back, out of sight? (Brilliant Husband spotted that one.) More to the point, why doesn't he just take off the suit? It doesn't pay to ask plot questions with this show.
We meet Pam's parents and wonder how Pam ever turned out as well as she did. June Lockhart plays Pam's mom! Poor Pam! Yes, it makes all three of their lives more difficult, but Pam gets no real benefit out of the suit.
"Saturday Night on Sunset Boulevard"
Wherein our unlikely team, combined with Ralph's class of underachievers, rescue a Russian defector and his Italian lover; and Bill fails a lie detector test on the last question, "Has anything unusual happened to you in the last six months?"
Not the most brilliant episode, it combines After-School Special wisdom ("Wow, Ms. Davidson! I never thought someone could find brains sexy!") with a few great moments. My favorites are Bill hanging up on the kidnappers and pulling the phone cord so Ralph can't pick back up. "Deal from strength," he tells Ralph. (I nearly wrote that phrase in an e-mail to a grad student recently, but I couldn't face either properly attributing it or leaving it unattributed when I knew I was quoting Bill Maxwell, so I reworded). Later Bill pretended that he has done the same thing with the bureau chief, when in fact he ended the conversation on a supplicating note and only started yelling into the phone after the other man had hung up. I also loved Pam deciding to try to be a hero herself. Pushing the dumpster in the way of the car with the bad guys and their kidnap victims was a good idea, Pam! Standing around to see the results was not!
"Reseda Rose" is also great fun. We see Rhonda's mother, who's a hoot; I wouldn't have minded seeing more of her. The episode also features wonderful interactions among the main cast. Ralph's ex-wife turns up: my favorite scene is probably the one where Bill keeps responding to her with snarky remarks for Ralph's benefit, and Alicia simply pretends not to hear him. Much of the verbal humor in this show comes from people talking past each other or simply not listening.
Ralph annoys Bill by pretending to have a "holograph" and speaking faux Russian when he's really getting nothing. Katt proves again that he's great at physical humor when he puts on someone else's suit over his jammies so Rhonda's mom won't see the suit, and the pants keep falling down. It's basic vaudeville, but he makes it funny. (Small Child enjoyed these parts much more than we did; I bet I did when I first saw the episode, too.) Pam has to put up with these crazy people!
"My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys" features Bill and Ralph having separate crises about what a hero is. Ralph's attempts to stop bad guys nearly result in disasters for innocent people, twice, and Ralph puts the suit away. Bill's hero, his unit captain from Korea, is a cop gone bad; Bill veers between certainty that Trace is about to commit a major crime and certainty that he's wronged the man just thinking so. John Hart appears as himself: one of the two actors who played The Lone Ranger in the old tv show. It's cheesy, but I really did feel for both Ralph and Bill. I love that Pam and Ralph decide to back up Bill even when Bill has pretty much convinced himself that he's wrong. I also like Ralph's little speech about how scared he was when the shooting started and he wasn't wearing he suit, and he doesn't understand how Bill can do this all the time. (And Ralph suiting up right there in Bill's apartment—hey, the guy is cute!)
We get to see where Bill lives: the Murphy bed in the little apartment, the maps on the walls, the gun rack next to the door. Somebody needs a life! Then there's Bill opening the door in shorts, a sleeveless shirt, and the double holster, when he's clearly hung over and not quite functioning right—I don't think I actually needed to see that.
Great line: early in the episode, Tracy Morgan tells Bill, "Pressure makes diamonds." Later, Bill tells Ralph, "Pressure makes diamonds—George Patton." (According to the Internet, Patton really did say it. Of course, you should see what the Internet thinks John Lennon said.)
I love how excited Bill gets when they're going to catch the bad guys; he never really did grow up. He's still a little kid at heart playing cops and robbers, but with live ammo. I love how Ralph sometimes gets excited and happy—and sometimes, it's just because he's amused at seeing Bill so excited! Poor Pam gets left out of that a little, but when it comes to insults, she gives as good as she ever gets!
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i love this show!
same here.
i think sellecca was great as pam. she played it like she was the grown-up among 2 crazy kids. BTW i think bill had a major crush on pam.
several years ago i heard they were going to make a movie of this with *gag* adam sandler *gag* as ralph.
i was litterly queasy at the thought of it.
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*HUGS*
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