While reading an interview with Kurtwood Smith (a.k.a. Red Foreman, the greatest TV dad ever) the other day, I ran across a bit of pop-cultural flotsam that is so drenched in the atmospherics of the early 1980s, I can smell the Drakkar Noir through my monitor:

Let’s count the MTV-inflected cliches — er, tropes, rather, let’s call them tropes — of low-rent ’80s action shows, shall we? You’ve got throbbing synth music, ground-level camera angles, rain-slicked asphalt reflecting light and color, and a generic urban-alley setting. You’ve got the “hero walk” coming out of a completely unexplained back-light as the electric guitars crash in. There’s a cast that’s downright painful in its self-conscious diversity-by-design (i.e., token black guy, token Asian guy — who’s a martial artist, naturally — token Latino, token woman), all of them with cool(ish) names like “Bandit,” “Eagle,” “Dragon,” “T.J.,” “Dancer,” and “Gaucho.” All except for the woman, who shares the same name as the actress who plays her — “Tracy” — because, well, I guess because chicks don’t get cool street names. And of course we’ve got the cops who have to ride herd over this bad bunch: the hard-as-nails captain who thinks this whole deal is a bad idea, and the slightly more forgiving lieutenant who’s kind of amused by his captain’s discomfort and will no doubt become a father figure to these misunderstood street kids, these… renegades. You stir all of those elements together and you’ve got a show that put the awesome in the Awesome ’80s.

Except I don’t remember a second of it. And neither do you. Don’t tell me you do, either, because we both know you really don’t.

The Renegades — not to be confused with the Lorenzo Lamas vehicle Renegade, which aired in syndication a decade later — lasted all of six episodes during the 1983 television season. According to a scant Wikipedia entry, the show was inspired, in part, by the 1979 cult classic The Warriors. and also perhaps by a 1981 TV-movie starring Patrick Swayze called Return of the Rebels. The premise of The Renegades must’ve seemed pretty shopworn even in ’83: a street gang becomes undercover agents for the cops to avoid jail time. Precisely the sort of hackneyed stuff that The Simpsons and Married… with Children would be making fun of by the end of the decade. But honestly what I find really fascinating about The Renegades isn’t this show itself, but rather all the talent that survived it and went to bigger and better things.

Most prominent, of course, is Swayze, who had already appeared in Coppola’s adaptation of The Outsiders at this point, but was still a couple years away from his breakout roles in the jingoistic Cold War wankfest Red Dawn (1984) and the TV miniseries North and South (1985). Following those successes, he’d achieve matinee-idol immortality with Dirty Dancing (1987), Ghost (1990), and that basic cable favorite Road House (1989).

Tracy Scoggins  has worked regularly in both television and feature films for decades, appearing on TV series ranging from The Fall Guy, Manimal, and TJ Hooker in the ’80s to Doogie Howser, MD,  and Highlander (among others) in the ’90s, right up to a role last year in Castle. She’s well-known to sci-fi fans as Captain Elizabeth Lochley in the final season of Babylon 5 and its various spin-off properties, as well as for a regular part on Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.

Brian Tochi was a busy child actor during the ’70s (he was a regular on the Saturday-morning live-action series Space Academy, one of my favorites back in the day). Following The Renegades, he appeared in Revenge of the Nerds and a couple of Police Academy sequels, as well as various episodic TV gigs, but he increasingly shifted into voice work, acting in a slew of animated series and, most notably, providing the voice of Leonardo in the original live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies.

Randy Brooks has likewise done a lot of episodic TV, and was a regular on The West Wing from 2000-05. He was also in Reservoir Dogs.

And Kurtwood Smith, the man who started me down this rabbit hole in the first place, was four years away from playing the most despicable street thug ever, Clarence Boddicker, in the original RoboCop. For a long time, he was Clarence to me, no matter what he played. Then came That 70s Show, one of the funniest sitcoms ever, in my opinion. And now he’s Red to me. Forever. He’s currently part of the ensemble on ABC’s Resurrection, a series I have never seen. But he’s still Red.

There was a lot of behind-the-scenes talent on The Renegades, too. The show’s executive producers, brothers Lawrence and Charles Gordon, along with director Roger Spottiswoode and screenwriter Steven de Souza, would collaborate together again when they created the movie that made Eddie Murphy a superstar, 48 Hrs., and then a few years later the Gordons and de Souza really hit one out of the ballpark by launching the Die Hard franchise.

Oh, and it also looks to me like The Renegades might have been an influence on 21 Jump Street, which had a similar look and premise to this and helped get the fledgling Fox network off the ground, not to mention bringing a young actor named Johnny Depp into the spotlight.

Not bad for a cheesy misfire that nobody remembers, eh? It makes me wonder how many other bad and forgotten shows were an unlikely nexus of future success?

So, one of the hottest things running right now is the HBO television series Game of Thrones, based on a series of massively popular (and just plain massive) novels by George R.R. Martin. If you don’t know, it’s an epic fantasy set in the imaginary world of Westeros. The focus is on the intrigues of several noble families all jockeying for political power, while, in the background, is the ominous approach of a decades-long winter… and with it, mythical monsters who aren’t so mythical, and aren’t at all friendly. The series is handsomely produced, well written and acted, and it stars a number of actors whose work I really enjoy, notably Sean Bean and the amazingly charismatic Peter Dinklage. Sounds like it ought to be right up my alley, doesn’t it? And yet, in spite of all that, I really don’t care for it much.

Like so much of the dramatic television that everyone has gushed about in recent years — The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, the Battlestar Galactica remake — its tone is just too damn bleak for my tastes. It is, as our colleague Jaquandor has said, a show about awful people doing awful things (or something like that… my apologies if I’m not quoting him accurately), up to and including the murder of a child after he discovers a brother and sister making the beast with two backs. No matter how fine the quality of a TV series, regardless of how many awards it’s won or rave reviews it’s received, I just don’t enjoy the Grim ‘n’ Gritty™ enough to invest a large chunk of my life in it. Yes, Shakespeare wrote about rape, incest, corruption, and murder, too… but Hamlet is only three hours long, whereas Game of Thrones has aired 40 hours’ worth of episodes with two more 10-episode seasons in the works. It’s just too much time spent in the company of people I don’t like and an atmosphere I find revolting.

But it occurs to me that perhaps it isn’t the story being told so much as the idiom in which it is told. In other words, I don’t care for the modern trend toward Grim ‘n’ Gritty™ storytelling… but what if Game of Thrones had been told in a different way… perhaps… the way stories used to be told on television?

Behold the following video clip, which apparently comes from an ancient VHS tape that somehow fell through a wormhole into our world… the opening credits of a Game of Thrones series that was produced in the 1980s of a parallel dimension:

Now that’s a Game of Thrones I could get into!

(Here’s the actual series opener, just for reference. Thanks to my friend James Cole for finding the “pre-imagined” version.)

One of the more pleasant surprises of the TV season just ending has been The Goldbergs, an ABC sitcom predicated on nostalgia for the late, great 1980s. I wasn’t sure about this one at first — the pilot episode was a queasy mismatch of mean-spirited snark and treacly sentiment that had just enough laughs to bring me back for another try. Fortunately, the showrunners saw the problem and modulated the yelling and sarcasm in later episodes, allowing the show to develop its own quirky flavor that’s a lot less Married… with Children and a lot more The Wonder Years.

The Goldbergs actually echoes The Wonder Years — that landmark coming-of-age series that ran in the late ’80s/early ’90s, but was set 20 years earlier — in a number of ways, which I suspect is probably intentional. Like The Wonder Years, the show is built around a family of five familiar archetypes: grumpy dad, kooky mom, moody older sister, bullying lunkhead middle brother, and cute youngest brother, who serves as the protagonist of most stories. The Goldbergs also adds a sixth character to the recipe, a swinging-single grandfather who is winningly played by veteran character actor George Segal.

There are other similarities to The Wonder Years, notably a voice-over narration supplied by an adult version of the youngest brother, as well as the show’s use of original music from the period to comment on and enhance the storylines. (The season ender last week deployed Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” in a way that was simply sublime. If any Gen-Xer watching that episode didn’t end up with a lump in their throat and a big old grin on their lips, they need to catch the first time-traveling DeLorean back to the ’80s and do it all over again.)

However, one big and very remarkable difference between The Goldbergs and The Wonder Years is the way they respectively handle time. While the latter show identified each season as representing a specific historical year, as well as a specific school year/grade level for its young protagonist, The Goldbergs takes a more… post-modern approach. We are informed in the voice-over each week that the show is set in a generalized “1980-something.” This gimmick — which I think is actually pretty funny — allows the producers to include familiar pop-cultural landmarks, fads, clothing styles, and news events from all over the decade without smart-alecks like me pointing out, for example, that there were five years between the release of The Goonies and the advent of the Reebok Pump basketball shoe, two ’80s icons that have both figured prominently in recent episodes. This approach gives the show a slightly absurdist tone, but in a weird way, it helps to better capture the sense of the Awesome ’80 than a show with a more persnickety focus on detail might. We end up with something that feels true rather than strictly factual. Kind of like the jumbled, middle-aged, increasingly unreliable memories of the Gen-Xers who surely comprise the show’s target demographic.

(It also occurs to me that perhaps this “1980-something” trope says something about how we Xers recall our youth versus how the Baby Boomers who made The Wonder Years saw theirs. They were all about earnestness and bittersweet poignancy, whereas — if a sitcom can be said to be representative of a generation — we’re a lot more irreverent about our formative decade. That’s not to say The Goldbergs is never poignant — I frequently get a little something in my eye while watching — but it lacks the self-consciousness and self-importance of its predecessor. To follow this through to the grossest overgeneralization I’ll ever make based on a half-hour sitcom, the Boomers wanted to change the world; we Xers just wanted to have fun with it.)

The Goldbergs‘ theme song — if a composition only 30 seconds long can really be called a song — has a similar post-modern, mix-and-match origin. Performed by a band called I Fight Dragons, “Rewind” is a mixture of pop instruments and vocals with something called “chiptune,” electronic music and other sounds originally synthesized by vintage computers and video games. The result, like the show itself, is weirdly effective at evoking the feel of the ’80s without really being much like an actual TV theme from the era. I’ll warn you now before you click “Play”: it’s insanely catchy.

I love it.

I recently tweeted I Fight Dragons to ask if there’s a longer version of this, and they actually responded… it won’t be on their upcoming album, but they will “definitely be doing a full-length version soon.” Something to watch for…

Over on his Atomic Pulp blog, Christopher Mills reminds us that Tales of the Gold Monkey wasn’t the only high-adventure series set in the 1930s that ran during the ’82-83 television season. CBS wanted in on the post-Raiders of the Lost Ark action as well (Gold Monkey was on NBC), so they offered up Bring ‘Em Back Alive, starring Bruce Boxleitner as big-game hunter Frank Buck.

Buck was a real guy, a celebrity of the ’30s and ’40s who’d found fame by capturing exotic animals unharmed during a time period when people were a whole lot less sensitive about shooting things, even rare and beautiful things. He wrote a book about his experiences, from which the TV series took its title, and eventually parlayed his celebrity into starring roles in the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus and a whole string of jungle movies, including an Abbott and Costello comedy (Africa Screams) and a 15-part cliffhanger serial. Now, I’ll be honest and admit that I don’t remember too much about Bring ‘Em Back Alive, but I think it’s probably a fair bet that Boxleitner’s version of Frank Buck didn’t have too much to do with the actual man.

Christopher Mills says that, while Gold Monkey was largely character-driven, BEBA was “more like old Republic adventure serials, with exciting stunts, a likable, two-fisted swashbuckling lead, and action-packed stories.” My memory of it is far less precise, as I said. I mostly recall thinking that Gold Monkey was the better of the two, with higher production values and a cool old airplane to boot (old airplanes being an immediate “value-add” in my book, even when I was 12). Weirdly enough, though, I have always remembered the show’s opening theme, which went a little something like this:

You see, for a couple of years I was recording TV themes by holding my old SoundDesign clock-radio with the built-in cassette deck up to the television speaker and trying not to make too much noise as I depressed the clunky “Play” and “Record” buttons. I must’ve taped several dozen themes from that general time period, all on the same cassette. I can only imagine it would make for an incredible time capsule now. Sadly, and rather unexpectedly given how much crap I’ve managed to hold onto over the years, that particular tape went MIA long ago. But I know that it had the theme for Bring ‘Em Back Alive on it, along with Gold Monkey, Magnum PI, Simon and Simon, Shogun, and a lot of other jaunty tunes that were just perfect for listening to on my Walkman as I rode around town on my old red Schwinn with the banana seat… damn, I wish I still had that tape.

Incidentally, you may have noticed Boxleitner’s co-star in BEBA, Cindy Morgan. She’s probably best known for playing the delectable Lacey Underall in Caddyshack, but she also appeared with Boxleitner in Tron the very same year that Bring ‘Em Back Alive debuted on television. Boxleitner was, of course, the title character, and like him, Morgan played a double role: Lora, the girlfriend of Tron’s User Alan in the real world, and Tron’s girl Yori in the computer realm. Hollywood must’ve been a truly small town back in the day. Morgan is still a lovely woman, judging from the photos on her official web site. It features a pretty nifty collection of photos from all three of her major works, Caddyshack, Tron, and Bring ‘Em Back Alive; the BEBA gallery is here.

I haven’t done one of these in a long time, and in light of the previous entry, this one seems appropriate:

So, you know what I was saying in the previous entry about not remembering Ally McBeal very well? I’d totally spaced that Courtney Thorne-Smith and Greg Germann were in this show. It all seems like a dream that’s evaporated before you make it from your bed to the bathroom for your morning rituals…

I really like that song, though, for whatever that’s worth…

In honor of the late David Carradine:

Sorry for the poor quality of this clip; it’s the only one I could find. Still, even with the warbly audio and washed-out picture, it gives a good idea of what Kung Fu was like for those who aren’t familiar with it. If this piques your interest at all, the show is available on DVD (but not Hulu, oddly enough).

As always when I watch these old intros, I’m amazed how long this is. Back in the day, a television series went to huge lengths to explain its premise for newcomers, and to set the mood for what was to come. Now, I guess the assumption is that you already know what you’re about to watch, and anyway we need to scrounge every spare second for actual storytelling so we can cram in another commercial or three. Seriously, if you compare the average runtime of an hour-long TV drama from 1975 to a modern show, we’ve lost nearly ten minutes to advertising.

Yet another piece of evidence that, in a lot of ways, the 1970s and ’80s were a much better time…

I made several references in the previous entry to St. Elsewhere, a series I remember with a lot of affection but honestly not much detail. It’s been a long time since I posted a TV title sequence, so I thought this might be a good time to revive the category. The sound quality on this clip is a little dodgy; the source appears to be an old VHS tape that’s seen its better days:

I always liked that music. Somewhere I have an old audio cassette containing a bunch of themes from the early ’80s that I recorded by holding a microphone up to the television speaker, and I know the St. Elsewhere theme is one of them. And I’d completely forgotten that Denzel Washington got his start on this show! How unlike me, given my usual command of useless trivia. Would it redeem me in the eyes of my loyal readers if I mention that William Daniels, a.k.a. Dr. Mark Craig, was the voice of KITT in the original Knight Rider series?

The first season of St. Elsewhere is available on DVD or Hulu, if you’re interested. I’m thinking I need to check it out again myself…