My childhood guitar hero Rick Springfield (a.k.a. “my main man”) has been a busy guy lately. His memoir Late, Late at Night and his debut novel Magnificent Vibrations were both well reviewed and commercially successful; his collection of acoustic recordings, Stripped Down, was released in February and was pretty awesome; he’s also got an album of new material due later this year; and he’s currently on tour with two other classic acts of the 1980s, Loverboy and The Romantics, which I imagine would be an absolute blast of a concert. (Sadly, they’re not coming anywhere near Salt Lake City; well, they’re playing Vegas, which isn’t that far away, but the stars aren’t going to line up for me to go to this one.) And, oh yeah, if you haven’t heard, he’s co-starring alongside somebody named Meryl Streep in a new movie that opened last weekend. I saw it Saturday night and thought it was great; hopefully, I’ll find some time in the next couple days to write a review.
Ricki and the Flash is Rick’s first feature-film appearance since his somewhat, ahem, notorious 1984 big-screen debut, Hard to Hold, a movie I personally maintain doesn’t suck nearly as much as you’ve probably heard, but certainly isn’t anybody’s idea of a career highlight. (If nothing else, the film had a great soundtrack, which gave Rick two more hit singles for his discography. And of course there was that brief nude scene that’s provided him with years of between-song banter for his live concert appearances…) But while three decades have passed since we last saw him in a cinema, you can’t accuse him of being camera-shy during that time. During the ’90s, he starred in a string of TV movies, including the pilot for what became (with a different actor in the lead) the cult favorite vampire-cop series Forever Knight; he’s reprised his signature role of Dr. Noah Drake on General Hospital several times; he’s taken a cue from William Shatner and appeared as a warped version of himself in the David Duchovny vehicle Californication; he did a funny and nicely self-deprecating episode of the sitcom Hot in Cleveland; and just recently he earned good reviews for his work on season two of True Detective (evidently, Rick’s work was the best thing about this season).
And then there was the series High Tide
What’s that? You’ve never heard of High Tide? Well, to be honest, neither had I until I ran across a mention of it a few days ago in a pre-Ricki and the Flash interview focusing on Rick’s acting work. I haven’t been able to find out too much about it, either, only that it ran for three seasons between 1994 and 1997; it was filmed on location in New Zealand; and it was about two surf-bum brothers who pay the bills with occasional private-investigator gigs. I’m assuming the series was syndicated, since this opening credit sequence from the first season looks like a blend of Baywatch and Lorenzo Lamas’ Renegade, with all the bikini babes, bright colors, awkward fight choreography, and eyepoppingly tacky clothes that entails:
Looks pretty awful, I know… but I have to confess, I kind of miss this sort of thing. The mid-90s syndicated actioners were crap, but they were reliably entertaining crap, and I used to watch a lot of them. Looking back at them now, they have a simplicity and, yes, even a sort of naive innocence that is sorely lacking in today’s grim-n-gritty pop cultural landscape. And they also prove a theory of mine, which is that decades aren’t as strictly compartmentalized as we tend to want to imagine them. The early ’80s looked a heckuva lot like the ’70s, for instance. And while this series may have been made in the ’90s, “two surf-bum brothers who work as PIs” is about as 1980s a premise as I’ve ever heard!
Needless to say, this series does not exist on officially sanctioned DVDs, but I think I’m going to do some poking around and see if I can find it somewhere. Because, awful or not, I really want to watch this… I have a feeling it’ll make me feel either young again or really damn old.
God help me.
