One New York Life

I have a very dim recollection of watching this show when I was a little kid. I’m pretty sure I remember it only because I remember the bright red outfit and the funny symbol which imprinted on my 3-year-old mind. I remembered it being hysterically funny. When I saw it available on DVD, I decided to give it a shot to see if my dusty, 27-years-ago recollections were correct.

Turns out… meh.

The reason, I think, it appealed to me in my younger days because of its purposeful resemblance to a live-action superhero cartoon. The premise is not horrible — Special ed teacher Ralph Hinkley (or Hanley… or Hinkle, depending on the episode. Originally, I thought the change from Hinkley to Hanley was because a network-head thought “Ralph Hinkley” sounded too much like “Jewey McJewenstein” but it was actually because some guy named Hinckley trying to assassinate President Reagan — who knew?) is in the desert with his class on a field trip. He and FBI agent Bill Maxwell are visited by aliens who give Ralph the iconic, super-power granting red suit and charge Maxwell with supplying the hero with crimes to solve. As he’s walking back to his car, he loses the instruction booklet. It’s the wacky meeting of the by-the-book, cold-war, 60s era FBI agent and the special ed, change the world, 80s California hippie teacher! It’s Dragnet meets Superman, but if Superman was clueless!

The Good

• I don’t really recall if television shows generally had great soundtracks in the early 80s. But the soundtrack to this show uses real 80s tunes that always fit the scene. I remember most 80s shows using scores or stock music. In addition to the iconic “Believe It Or Not” theme song, which actually became more popular than the show hitting #2 on Billboard, the music staff picked songs that actually fit with what was going on in the montage they’re airing. I like it much better than the current “pick something by The Fray that someone will pay us for” model used by Scrubs and Grey’s Anatomy.
• And speaking of the montages — this show has a lot of them. I’m not sure exactly when TV shows switched to the 42-minute format we get today from the 50-minute we have here but holy crap did shows in the 50-minute format have some filler. Montages and extended scenes that meander. I’m not sure why this is “good”. I guess I’m a fan of less commercials… on a commercialess DVD… whatever.
• Stephen J Cannell is the creator of this series. You might remember Cannell’s shows by the end of the episode where the pipe-smoking guy is typing away — then he rips the paper out of the typewriter and throws it into the air and it lands on a pile of paper and becomes the C in Cannell. He’s also responsible for shows like 21 Jump Street, Silk Stalkings (which was way ahead of its time on USA’s “character’s welcome” campaign and America’s love of the procedural crime drama), The A-Team, and Hunter. The first season’s ongoing B-storyline is Ralph’s quest to win over his special-education “delinquent” students by believing in them. Which is fine, I guess, but I do remain curious why his special ed students in Southern California all sport Brooklyn and North Jersey accents.
• It’s always amusing to look for the things that change from a pilot to the launch of a series. Sometimes it’s ridiculously brazen. In this show, for instance, Ralph has a son and an actress/model ex-wife who he’s trying to win custody from. After the show starts, the son is all but phased out and the wife is never mentioned again apart from an occasional plot hook. Also, Connie Selleca’s Pam Davidson is rapidly upgraded from “Ralph’s Lawyer” to “Ralph’s Girlfriend.”

The Bad

• The entire premise of the show is based on the fact they got a magical suit from the aliens and lost the directions on how to use it. Ralph lost the direction book in the desert. In the pilot, he shrugs and says “oh, I must have lost it. Oh well!!” Isn’t this a pretty major plot point? It seems like a glowing book would stand out in the middle of the desert. A cursory look between where Maxwell parked and where Ralph’s bus stalled would have been nice instead of immediately throwing your hands up and say “darn, it just must be gone.” The fact they never even tried to find the book bothered me for far too long.
• I know this is one of the comedic elements of the show, but the “I can’t figure out how to fly straight” running joke gets old after about the third episode. They keep it up for the entire season. I understand it’s the show’s gimmick, but if you were suddenly given a supersuit, wouldn’t you at least try to master the thing? You get the impression that Ralph only puts the suit on for the episodes and seems perfectly fine with crashing in to things and not landing. I don’t know, maybe it’s me, but I think I’d go out to the desert and try to learn how to fly straight in my off time. You know, so I could get where I needed to be.
• I’m sure I loved this as a little kid, but the stupid cartoon sound effects were distracting and dumb. Like, do you really need to dub in the sound of a chugging train when he’s using super speed or the Scooby Doo “we’re running in place before our feet finally stop sliding on the ground” noise or the Looney Toons “slip on a banana peel” noise when he throws a bad guy? Was the world really clamoring for Batman the television series’s combat in 1981?
• The “I’m a wacky guy in LA running around in a set of tights” thing is very overdone. The best example of this is in the third episode. Ralph is trying to figure out how the suit’s invisibility power works and can’t quite figure out how to become visible. He goes to a restaurant where he’s supposed to be meeting his girlfriend’s parents and suddenly becomes visible in the back of the restaurant and can’t figure out how to become invisible again. He tells his girlfriend he has to make his way through the dining room to get out while clearly standing next to a big EXIT sign in the back. So he pretends to be a stage performer who entered the restaurant to sell a show somewhere else in the city. Later, we’re supposed to buy that neither of her parents (hardware store owners from Montana or some such Middle America state) recognize the guy who made a spectacle of himself in the nice restaurant. I have some experience with rural parents who come to visit large urban areas. They remember things that are out of the ordinary. Exquisitely.

The Rest

I don’t want to get too much in to the poor quality of the special effects. It was 1981 so pretty much everything is done in front of a very obvious green screen. I could mention the gratuitous use of stock footage or the poorly-matched, Italian looking stuntman. In the Pilot, Ralph leaps over a wall to get on someone’s property and crashes through the trees and lands in a heap on the other side of the wall. He also crashes next to the same wall in a heap in no less than three other episodes. What I took from this is that Southern California is filled with large mansions surrounded by tan, stone walls beneath lush trees. Also, were all shows from the early 80s very obviously not filmed in sound studios? The conversations that are filmed inside have a very indie-movie feel to them. The dialog echoes and the lighting is weird. Am I just spoiled now?

A somewhat minor complaint about the DVD. Why in the world would you include the pilot movie for the Greatest American Heroine spin-off, which happens two years after the end of this show, on the season one DVD? It was cut from a two-hour movie in to a one-hour episode for the syndication package, but it gives away some pretty large plot points for the remaining two seasons. One being that the aliens give him another direction book which he also loses. And, holy crap is Heroine a bad show. Like, the regular show gets a lot (and I do mean A LOT) of mileage from Agent Maxwell being a 1960s guy who isn’t ready for Pam Davidson’s strong woman of the 80s, but Heroine turns it in to a major plot point. Robert Culp also ages about a billion years between 1981 and 1986. I don’t think the world was quite ready for a little 5′2″ woman beating up men in 1986.

And really, how has THIS show not been given another nostalgia run on some network? Regardless of my thoughts on the original, it does have a cult following. Doesn’t this seem like something that could get some legs on CW or Sci-Fi if you stuck some young, hot star in to the suit? Especially with the current string of comic book movie successes?

I’m kind of torn on whether to watch the next two seasons. It’s pretty bad.