A Hole to the 80s

So yesterday was Max Headroom Broadcast Signal Intrusion Day, one of the holidays in my personal calendar, along with Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov Saves The World Day. And of course Wolfenoot!

Happy Wolfenoot, everybody!

Anyway, I wound up on Youtube, falling down a hole into the 80s, which of course culminated in me giving myself a resounding Airwolf theme earworm (Season 1, naturally). Which led to me thinking about Airwolf and the 80s in general and its whole subgenre of Vigilantes With An Uneasy Relationship To Formal Authority, from Magnum, PI to The Equalizer to The A-Team. And of course, the technocrat version of that, including Knight RIder and, yes, Airwolf.

I mentioned on Twitter that one of the amazing things about Airwolf is how good it still looks, which has to do with the sheer amount of money they spent on the show. Its budget was something like $1.2 million an episode in an era when most television shows cost half that; it had a full orchestral score written and conducted by Sylvester Levay; it featured what were, at the time, marquee actors; it had practical stunts and effects rather than just a lot of b-roll of a Bell helicopter.