zapdude

I rarely notice anything on the old-guard networks, so I was completely unaware that this series even existed. After the unfortunate passing of Robin Williams I learned about The Crazy Ones and watched it.

Robin Williams had a set of characters. These were him. Just like my grandfather, he could call up an appropriate character and bring it into perspective. I'm absolutely certain that every day on the set of The Crazy Ones involved a lot of laughing, a lot of fun, and a LOT of material that couldn't possibly be used on network television. What we got was a mediocre but entertaining show.

Robin Williams as the 63 year old elder agency head is perfect because of these things, they are not faults. He's older, more mature, more experienced, definitely more jaded. The younger ones are learning at his knee, as it should be.

As a requiem for Robin Williams' career, this series is a tragic and amazingly funny summary. They're all there. There's a bit of Mork, a bit of Mrs. Doubtfire, some Adrian Cronauer, you'll recognize the Genie, and the Indian Chief, and more. Yes, Robin's career was stale and he was essentially doing the same shtick as he was doing in the 70s. But it was good. He was fast. He was an amazingly funny man, filled with heart and care. We loved him for it. Maybe the younger generation will never get Robin, but anyone over 30 should have.

If I had left behind the body of work that Robin Williams did, and that included this little unpolished gem, I'm certain I could have left this planet fulfilled. We will miss him.

No, really. I knew it was going to be bad. Really bad. I mean, a low budget movie about dinosaurs roaming around in LA is going to be bad. You know it's going to rip off ideas and scenes from Jurassic Park. Of course it is... because that's THE benchmark for dinosaur movies. And it's going to be a clone of all the disaster/horror/animals at large movies ever made. If you're like me, you're completely aware of this going in. In fact, you crave a good Cheese-fest B-movie. But no matter how low your expectations are, this movie was still worse.

Considering how far the CG industry has come since Jurassic Park, which was 20 years ago now, I have what I consider a reasonable expectation of monster SFX to be. This wasn't that good. I mean, they actually failed to match 20 year old tech, or apparently develop any kind of realistic motion models. The flying dinos look like claymation. The matting is horrid, with poorly rendered CG dinos clearly not even remotely matching the background.

Nah, there's no redemption. And yet, many will watch this on Netflix because it's there. So if you're checking this review prior to watching, take your lowest expectations and drop them one or two levels.

It's absolutely insane that there can be this many people in the industry who have access to the means of making a movie, but still have no idea how to make a movie. Bad script, bad acting, bad CG, bad music, bad sound FX, bad audio mixing, bad foley, bad continuity, bad makeup, bad costumes, bad lighting, almost every aspect is bad, which is why you'll want to watch it for the cheese factor.

The stars of CHiPs are not actually Eric Estrada or Larry Wilcox (both of whom I met at a car show years ago), the stars are the cars, the streets, the freeways, the city of LA, and the entire culture of its era, grasped and documented in a snapshot of life in those days.

Of course CHiPs was cheesy, even for its day it was about as authentic as Miami Vice... but they were both enormously popular shows that captured something more than they realized they were at the time.

The show started when I was 14, at a time when there were only a few channels and if you watched TV you probably watched it. Really, it's very low key, relatively non-violent, and the cops were more human and fallible, as well as forgiving. Very few people are wearing seat belts, people are smoking, cars are smoking too (gotta love the smoggy days that were more common back then), and the girls... really smoking, even if their jeans rode above their navels and the hairstyles took 3 hours.

My then-teenage friends and I followed CHiPs, we discussed each episode, we dreamed about a land far south of our native Calgary where January had sunny shirtsleeve days. We wanted to believe that THIS was the world we would grow up in. Too bad things took a hard left turn as the drug culture and violent crime continued to erode society.

If you ever want to see what the ACTUAL world outside of studios looked like in the late 70s and early 80s, the cars and trucks on the streets, the hairstyles and (sorta) music, this is the show to watch. I went to LA for two weeks in early 1980, and can confirm that this really IS what the city looked like at the time.

By the way, the first season's music is less disco and more Funk... it was the 2nd season theme song that really kicked it into the Disco Era, which died a well deserved death even while the show was still in production. But even now, the theme song shows the raw excitement and exuberance that Disco brought to the world at the time (Disco, rest in peace, and we won't ever actually miss you).

I loved this show, I can't even imagine a series of this type making it in today's market. It still amazes me that these two cops could ALWAYS KNOW exactly what to do in every situation, from freeway crashes, hazardous materials handling, foam truck managing, delivering babies, etc. etc. Nobody could know everything they were expected to know.