An archive of articles about US television programmes and production.
Classic TV
Old Gems: Blue Thunder (1984)
Made in 1983, Blue Thunder was a cracking little action movie. Directed by John Badham and starring Roy Scheider (Jaws), it questioned the increasing use of military-grade equipment by the police and the new powers of surveillance available to the police that technology was beginning to afford them.
The centrepiece of the film was ‘Blue Thunder’ as it was nicknamed, an armour-plated police helicopter with a 20mm chain cannon, infra-red cameras, the ability to hover almost silently and microphones that can listen through walls – famously, as an on-screen caption said at the beginning of the movie, technology that was all available in the US at that point.
The film’s message was clear: we have to be very careful about this technology because in the wrong hands, even those of the government, law and order could be subverted. And at the end of the movie, Scheider lands Blue Thunder in front of a train and lets it blow up so no one can use it against the citizens of the United States.
So irony indeed that following the success of the movie, ABC decided to make a TV show in which Blue Thunder is benevolently used by Scheider’s character (now played by James Farantino and called Frank Chaney rather than Frank Murphy) to stop criminals, aided by Dana “Wayne’s World” Carvey and Bubba “Police Academy” Smith.
Here’s the halfway decent titles of the TV series.
