Well in order to ease my pounding headache, I thought I’d watch a little TV.  I haven’t seen much since I’ve lived here since I owned an incredibly old set but a few weeks ago a friend lent me a newer one.

One thing I love about Romania is you never know just what the heck is gonna come on.  And tonight I saw an old episode of the A-Team.  According to the Romanian TV guide (which you can see here if you’re interested), the show I saw tonight aired in 1983.

So, for a complete change of pace from my normal blogging, I will give you an episode recap of a show which hasn’t aired in 23 years.  My apologies if this offends anyone!
The Romanian channel calls the show “The Elite Team” or “The Elite Squad”, which is funny.  The background on the show is that 4 completely weird guys hang out in a specially marked black GMC van (complete with captain’s chairs and a racing stripe on the side), running around solving crimes or doing other odd jobs.  They’re actually all 4 of them criminals but of course they were “framed”.  All of the “A-Team” were supposedly soldiers together in Viet Nam and have remained super buddies despite their vast differences and long hours together in the cramped van.

The hilarious part is that every episode has the military police (US Army I think) chasing after them, hot on their heels, but never can find them even though they drive the conspicuous van at extremely high speeds throughout whatever city they live in.

These are the characters:

  • “Hannibal” – The silver-haired leader, always smoking cigars and making weird references to stuff.  The “mastermind” of the group.

  • “Face”

    • – Clearly the guy designed to be “attractive” to the female audience, has a “hip” attitude.  Mostly he does all the goofy crap.

  • “BA” – The nickname stands for “Bad Attitude” which is hilarious.  This is the guy most people remember, since he was played by “Mr. T”.  God help you if you don’t remember who Mr. T is but it’s good to see him in all his “glory”, complete with 20 pounds of gold neck chains and feathered earrings.  All he ever does is grunt and get angry but somehow he’s also the best engineer of the group.

  • “Murdock” – Supposed to be “insane” and is always hiding out in crappy VA mental hospitals.  The team find weird excuses to break him out whenever they need him, although to me if the guy really is so insane maybe they’re not helping his treatment any by constantly kidnapping him and forcing him to participate in vigilante missions

So… tonight’s episode is that a straight-talkin’ “no guff” police officer in unnamed City X has discovered that 4 elite SWAT officers on his police force are corrupt and are murdering people for cash.  In the beginning of the episode, he threatens to “go to the chief” and turn them in.  The 4 crooked cops all make a lot of blustery threats of killing his wife and daughter if he does it.

Next thing you know, somehow this “no guff” police officer has found the A Team to hire.  He hands them an envelope of $14,000 dollars, so it’s hilarious already that this “straight” cop is paying 4 felons to… we’re not sure what.  The “straight” cop says he is sure the 4 SWAT officers have committed “7 murders” but he has absolutely no proof.  So what the heck was he going to tell the chief the next day?  Even the A-Team is puzzled, what does he want them to do?  So the “straight” cop says “get them to confess, it’s the only way”.

So with absolutely no proof that “no guff” is not insane, the A-Team decide to take the mission.  We won’t see the straight cop again until the last 2 minutes of the show.  So Murdoch asks Mr. T if he’s still “fiddling with miniature electronics”.  The answer is yes, so with a stupid ruse, “Face” and an unnamed woman ally get into the police locker room.  Mr. T has “manufactured” tiny microphones which are hidden inside shirt buttons.  Why was the female ally brought along? Get this – to sew the bugged buttons onto the uniform shirts, which she does.

So now the A-Team is listening into the crooked SWAT officers, who luckily go around all the time wearing their uniforms.  The A-Team has these advanced microphone buttons but they’re recording the conversations on an ancient type machine like this.  Soon the four dirty SWAT team members plan another murder, although they never even hint or say whom they are doing this for.  A funny anachronism is that the price for this “hit” is just $2000 dollars.

Anyway, instead of giving the tape with all kinds of incriminating confessions to McGruff, the “straight” police officer, or something like that, the A-Team decide to “foil” the murder.  One of the bad cops is played by Dean Stockwell, the guy named Al who made wisecracks during the show “Quantum Leap” and always smoked cigars.  Anyway so Al, wearing his police uniform and using his police radio, uses a sniper rifle to kill the intended target.  Except it’s really Hannibal, wearing a bullet-proof vest.  Surprise! The A-Team then corner the crooked cops but instead of hauling them in, they just say “you better stop what you’re doing!”.

Mr. T, showing uncommonly good sense, goes insane and asks why the heck they let the bad cops go.  Murdoch just laughs and laughs and chews on his cigar and says he is implementing a “master plan”, the “same one” he used on a Vietnamese general during the war.  So the crew grumbles but there you go.  Along the way they trick the VA hospital yet again and get Murdoch out, who by the way had an arcade machine version of “Asteroids” in his hospital room, which was fun to see.

What’s also hilarious is that the A-Team supervan has a “car phone”.  There’s nothing funnier than how people used to imagine cell phones, because the van phone is literally one of those black old-style home phones complete with rotary dial haha I love it.  So using the button microphones, the A-Team continually mess with the dirty cops’ minds and finally get them to go paranoid.  The A-Team tells them to “confess in writing” to their crimes or else they’ll kill them all.  If I was one of the dirty cops I’d just laugh since the A-Team had like 10 chances to kill them but never even broke a rib.

The final showdown is in some abandoned amusement park, where the dirty cops shoot a million bullets into a room where they think the A-Team is holed up.  The A-Team’s master plan was to hide in the rafters and then jump down on the 4 bad cops, which ends up in each A-Team member chasing one bad cop on foot and lots of punching and hand-to-hand fighting.

In the last scene, we see the four A-Team members having a drink with the unnamed female colleague, who turns out to be a newspaper reporter, and McGruff.  They give McGruff most of his money back after ennumerating their expenses, which total just $3,000 dollars or so.  So McGruff reads the paper, wherein the female colleague doesn’t mention the A-Team and instead gives McGruff all the credit.  McGruff is chortling with delight when all of a sudden the A-Team has to scram because the Army police is hot on their tail.

We see the supervan driving away at top speed while there’s lots of tire squealing and horn wailing by the green Army police cars.  Then McGruff, back in the bar, asks the reporter woman what’s the A-Team’s motivation, apparently since they did so much for practically no money.  And with a grin on her face, the reporter woman says, “for the love of the jazz… for the jazz” with a psychedelic grin on her face.  Roll credits!

Oh yeah, by looking at the IMDB website, I see the reporter’s name is Amy Allen and she is sort of their “sidekick”.  Perhaps a better word is “groupie”.  The best part of the episode was when the head bad cop was in his girlfriend’s apartment and she was wearing straight-up 1983 “sexy” clothes – a leotard, shiny tights and a headband.  Ahhh sweet fashion memories…

I literally haven’t seen this show since it was on primetime television, which means at least 20 years ago.  Apparently there are some major fans of this show, who have set up fan websites with all the information you could ever wish to learn.  According to them, the episode I saw was called A Small But Deadly War.  According to this, it was the fifth episode of season one, so it’s a true “classic”.  The site gives it a rating of 4 stars out of 5.

Oh gosh, reading this I realize that the “jazz” thing was some kind of tag line.  My mistake.  Hey now, it’s been 20 years, I can’t be expected to remember everything!

What’s interesting is the show was created (partly) by Stephen Cannell, who has also created shows like “21 Jump Street”, “The Commish” and “The Greatest American Hero”.  Oh yeah plus the “Rockford Files” as well as a bunch I’ve never heard of.  I swore he had something to do with “Murder She Wrote” but apparently I’m wrong.

What a blast to the past for me… and now my headache is gone.  Apologies to those of you who are political junkies.  Thanks for indulging me!

Peace