Reminds you just how much fun 80s ‘hardware’ shows were

7 August 2006 Rob Buckley US TV Post a comment

Ah, Airwolf, Street Hawk: I do like to go on about them, I know. But there’s never really been their like since and they were such an important part of the 80s (for some people anyway).

Here are a couple of YouTube videos to illustrate the fun. The first is from early in Airwolf‘s pilot episode. It’s a live weapons demo principally designed to show off the helicopter to one of the Senators in charge of defence budgets. As always with early Airwolf, the sting is in the tail. It also features the late, great David Hemmings being delightfully evil and English.

Enjoy it – it never got this good again, thanks to CBS wanting the second season onwards to be more family-oriented. I ask you, how do you make a programme about a war helicopter family oriented?

The second clip is the equivalent sequence from the pilot episode of Street Hawk. This was a family show from the outset, hence its greater cheesiness. None of it made an awful lot of sense (you try doing 300mph in heavy Los Angeles traffic), but the show wasn’t about sense: it was about adrenaline. Who wouldn’t want to be Street Hawk after watching stuff like this? Even if you did only have a ten-speed sports bike…

You also get to enjoy the show’s theme, Tangerine Dream’s Le Parc, during this clip. To this day, I have an abiding love of early 80s German synth music as a direct result of Street Hawk. It’s a horrible affliction, but early 80s German synth music is coming back, I tell you.

Author

  • Rob Buckley

    I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.

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