I am rewatching Knight Rider
- Thread starter Gingerbread Demon
- Start date
That was more a knockoff of the previous year's film Blue Thunder, about an advanced military helicopter. There was actually a Blue Thunder TV series that premiered just two weeks before Airwolf, but ironically, the latter outcompeted it in the ratings and it was cancelled after 11 episodes.
At least the Blue Thunder had a tiny bit more realism to it then Airwolf with its infinitely large arsenal of missiles and mach 1 speed. I could picture a gunship like Blue Thunder in the air more then Airwolf despite liking both shows.
I remember there were two things I particularly disliked about Airwolf, which led me to give up on it. One was its over-the-top violence. I was still used to shows where the heroes avoided killing as a matter of course, and even in the contemporary The A-Team, all the thousands of bullets fired by the team never actually hit anyone. But I recall Airwolf being a lot more casual about the heroes gunning down large numbers of villains without blinking an eye. That's become unpleasantly routine in TV since then, but it was still unusual at the time, at least in the shows I watched.
The other thing I disliked was the cheesy and very repetitive synth score -- another harbinger of what would become quite commonplace in subsequent years, shows abandoning orchestral scores in favor of cheaper electronics (although that trend has fortunately reversed itself in the 21st century so far). But they did use an orchestral score in the pilot, and I liked the orchestral version of the Airwolf theme immensely more than the synth version. Either way, though, the theme is a heck of an earworm.
The other thing I disliked was the cheesy and very repetitive synth score -- another harbinger of what would become quite commonplace in subsequent years, shows abandoning orchestral scores in favor of cheaper electronics (although that trend has fortunately reversed itself in the 21st century so far). But they did use an orchestral score in the pilot, and I liked the orchestral version of the Airwolf theme immensely more than the synth version. Either way, though, the theme is a heck of an earworm.
Or due process. Scores of bad guys got shot to ribbons or blown up in Airwolf and yet no one ever faced a court or was arrested, or any form of due process. Trial by missile.
You know, there's long been this concern that media violence desensitizes kids, but it had the opposite effect on me -- I was hypersensitized. There was this time when I realized that so many of the movies and shows I'd seen in the past year (including Airwolf, I think, and one of the Indiana Jones movies, and probably one of the RoboCop movies) were just so packed with frequent, casual killing and a total disregard for human life, and I was sick of how ubiquitous the violence had gotten. It was just too much. Unfortunately, that trend has pretty much persisted to the present day.
Well, Japanese kids watch probably the most violent 'toons, but Japan has one of the lowest crime rate in the world...
