Airwolf

Cheaply produced, uses old aerial footage from original series, bad acting, the story falls apart as they kill off Dom and wound String in the first episode, rescue St John with amazing ease and insult every fan of the original series. If the original cast had remained this show might even have survived the budget cuts, alas it died a slow and very painful death at the hand of a cable tv company.

I was a die hard fan of the originally Airwolf while I was in my mid-teens, so I was definitely target audience at the time. Jan-Michael Vincent's brooding character was the stuff of legends for myself and my friends back then. The roar of Airwolf's engines was awe inspiring too us.

Then came the new Airwolf. Pure garbage. How finicky do you think a 15-16 year is about that sort of thing? We even thought David Hasselhoff was some sort of master thespian in Knight Rider for goodness sake. Some gratuitous helicopter scenes and some shooting would've probably at least kept our interest, maybe a plot or two that actually made us care about the characters even though we all knew that the show had jumped the shark... But no, they had to turn it into a trashy, soap-opera style drama with a bit of Airwolf thrown into the mix. Rubbish, I did NOT watch it more than a couple of times.

The USA version of Airwolf was a huge disappointment. I categorize this with Battlestar Galatica 1980, another dismal TV sequel also featuring the great acting talents of Barry VanDyke.

The characters from the original were killed off or written out to lighten the financial burden of reviving the show. Aerial footage was for the most part recycled from the original show, which, like Battlestar Galactica, recycled plenty of its own footage.

To further decrease costs, it appears that they shot on videotape rather than film resulting in a lower production quality look.

Airwolf went from sci-fi drama to Saturday morning cartoon. Keep this one in the vault please.

Argh!

POOR EXECUTION! I guess it was understandable that TPTB wanted to create this "fourth season" of Airwolf so it can go into syndication (and it was great to see the re-runs starting in 1989). But did they really have to make the results stupid? Yeah, it was shoestring budget and all or most of the flight footage was stock from the previous seasons. At least the writers could have done decent watchable stories and plots instead of making the results look like they feel sorry for themselves for being low budget.

I echo other fans that there should have been better closures for Archangel, Caitlin and Dom. At least for Archangel and Dom we got something (lame ones at that), but Caitlin just disappeared w/o any real explanation.

Poor Barry Van Dyke. He has the distinction of being a part of two substandard sequel series to two popular TV shows (Galactica 1980 being the other). Sorry, but he didn't make a convincing Saint John. (It would have been nice if Christopher Connelly reprised the role for continuity's sake, but he was probably already dying of cancer which he succumbed to in 1988.)

However, the one thing I will give credit to the producers of season 4 is, they brought Airwolf back to what she made for and that's fight foreign enemies.

To the original CBS series' discredit, during the latter seasons, they began to have Airwolf solve homegrown problems and some of them were best done without the helicopter. So much for keeping a top secret state-of-the-art flying machine secret! While the results of Season 4 left little to desire, at least Airwolf was a combat machine again fighting the real world enemies of the time and not baddies like greedy oil barons.

It was nice to see JMV to "pass the torch," but too bad the torch didn't burn as bright as before.

For many reasons, I found the original "Airwolf" series to be one of the best shows on television. The actions sequences were truly fantastic. Each character developed throught the run of the series.

Season four was a true waste of time. The characters were very weak and shallow, the overall tone of the show diminished. Originally, Only three characters were skilled enough to fly Airwolf. In the new series, it seemed that everyone on the show could fly airwolf, with equal skill.

On the original show, the characters, while flying Airwolf, always wore their helmets. The new version often featured bare-headed, wearing headsets, with no helmets.

The fourth season of Airwolf demonstrated the classic situation of a series being around one year too long. A good effort, but a very poor result.