Just in case you weren’t aware or have forgotten, television used to be absolute garbage — piping hot, steaming, damp, unmitigated garbage. And I don’t just mean because you were at the mercy of whatever the three networks decided to shovel out, whenever they decide to shovel it, I mean so much of it was absurd, idiotic crap. But, it was kinda fun crap, and, sure, in hindsight it’s baffling that a full-grown human adult would have ever said, something like “Ooh, I need to be back home by 8:30, so I can catch the latest episode of CHiPS,” but I guarantee you; That did happen. A lot. And the reason why a full-grown human adult might utter such a patently ridiculous statement is because CHiPs routinely had some of the most breathtakingly stupid and elaborately choreographed car wrecks ever committed to videotape. These were glorious automotive sacrifices to the gods of chaos, and I need to share some of them with you, right now.
For the uncultured, CHiPs was a crime drama that ran from 1977 to 1983 and followed a pair of California Highway Patrol motorcycle cops, Ponch and John, played by Erik Estrada and Erik Estrada’s blond friend, whatshisname. The show was, charitably, stupid. And the Los Angeles portrayed in the show was also remarkably, even gleefully stupid, especially when it came to the highway network and how Angelenos interacted with it.
To see the show, you might think that California Driver’s Ed Official Best Practices was contained in a pamphlet that read “When unsure of what to do, stomp on the throttle, scream, and saw your steering wheel back and forth, with the same careful precision you may use were you attempting to free your arm from a combine. If possible, clench your eyes shut. Barriers, cliffsides, and trucks should all be targeted and driven towards without fail, at maximum speed. Via these time-tested practices, you should be able to handle any situation traffic throws your way!”
The typical CHiPs traffic situation usually starts with something small, or innocuous, like a sudden stop because someone thought they saw a mink coat on the road, or a yelled slight from one car to another. Then it begins to escalate, ramping up the disaster steadily until it erupts in an orgasm of absolute chaos. It’s kind of like how (I can’t believe this is the second time today this has come up) in childrens’ author Richard Scarry’s Busytown series of books, you’ll have something like a tomato bouncing out of the back of a truck, and that starts a cascade of events that ends with a wrecking crane smashing a jam truck into smithereens.
Of course, even without the elaborate chaotic wrecks, the show still manages to be both cartoony and display a dazzling array of the 1970s California carscape. In this one clip, we get an eye-rollingly cartoonish ending and incredible shots of an old Dodge Tradesman van, a ’73 Beetle like mine, a Studebaker Champion, old Datsuns, Ford F-100s, a glorious wine-colored AMC Pacer, and so much more:
But that’s tame by CHiPs standards, look at this shit, featuring a shit-talking guy in a Mazda RX-2 rotary that escalates into some absolutely unhinged road rage, along with some impressively self-repairing linkages:
Of course, absolutely nobody is wearing a seat belt or anything silly like that. Just some good old smash-your-way-to-safety driving going on here! It’s the best!
This next clip is arguably one of the most chaotic; it’s like a Busby Berkley routine, but with flying, flaming cars instead of women dancing in kaleidoscopic patterns. Here, just watch the damn thing:
I think you can see some of the cars getting re-used here, like that RX-2 (which gets decapitated). Also, no seat belt for the cop, and note the skillful way that driver of the blue Ford truck reacts, by rapidly shitting his pants and freaking out on that steering wheel, hard. Also, how many different directions of traffic are happening here? And why are cars such good ramps?
Want more? Of course you do, you sickos:
I love this one. That lady stops suddenly on the highway because she sees – at like 55 mph – a pile of fur that she identifies not as some roadkill, but a mink coat? And then when a car plows through a truck, it also clears two other cars, improbably parked perpendicular to the line of the road, like you’d see at a monster truck stunt show?
The cars blasting through the truck were okay, I guess, but what if there were two cars that did that? And what if one of the trucks was full of explosives? And what if it was all caused by an inattentive driver in a freaking Auburn Speedster? What then? Well, you can see for yourself:
Wow. Man, LA was fucking crazy in the 1970s.
You know, sometimes you want to contain your chaos to one vehicle, just to keep things simple. And maybe you want to mix up the scenery, and really tumble-dry a couple of kids in the back of a somersaulting camper as it rolls down a hill!
All this because that Muppety dad took his eyes off the road for just a second! And okay, maybe it makes me a bad person for laughing when mom got flung out of the door, but I think I did emit an unwanted burst of laughter then. Sorry.
All that stuff flying off the roof! I’m pretty sure they later showed those kids walking out okay, because, you know, Gen X kids were used to this kind of shit. This was just like, a Saturday for those two.
Sometimes it was the little things, like having a stolen ambulance chase, but the ambulance is full of dynamite, and street cleaners don’t give two shits about ambulances driving by with full lights and sirens:
How do Ponch and John manage to show up to work every day? Why isn’t the whole next episode just them in the break room, under blankets, staring blankly at walls and muttering “the ambulance was full of dynamite?” over and over?
Oh, I like this one, too – another great example about how complex and difficult jobs involving heavy equipment seem to have been given out to people with the same IQ as a few slices of ham:
Was the guy trying to outrun the fire on his own, barely-connected trailer? Did anyone tell him that the truck can be driven at something other than full throttle, and you can steer without yanking the wheel like you’re trying to judo-flip a guy over your shoulder?
Here, you probably need something to calm down. Watch this demolition derby episode, which features much more responsible driving:
Feel better? Good. Now it’s time to watch a flame-jobbed MG Midget go absolutely apeshit through a golf course:
That actually looks like it’d be pretty fun to have done! Also, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an MG with a flame paint job, but I say it works.
Okay, okay, one last one. With kids! In a Ford LTD Country Squire, and a good lesson about why you shouldn’t keep your skateboards in the driver’s footwell when you drive:
I’m impressed the kids could hear Ponch there, yelling at them. He must really know how to project, from the diaphragm.
There’s so much more. You could view CHiPs today as a sort of dystopian fantasy of a world irrefutably harmed by being populated exclusively with people suffering from intense cognitive impairments as a result of leaded gasoline, dangerous idiots who refuse to ever stop driving, unless presented with an opportunity to drive through a truck, ideally packed with explosives.
The one CHiPs episode that is forever burned in my brain is the one at the peak of the Satanic Panic with Donnie Most (Ralph Malf from Happy Days) playing some devil rocker with backward masking on his record. Something like “Moloch must die! Moloch must die by the fiery death!”
None of the driving took me out of the show, but Potsie’s friend as a Satan worshipping metal head? Not believable!
I think it was CHiPs. Otherwise, I may have imagined it. I was a weird kid…
Oh yeah, it was CHiPs. It’s WTF did I dream that? weirdness comes second only to the “Force Seven” episode about a secret squad of police ninjas led by Fred Dryer.
I’m sorry, but I think I had a stroke reading your comment.
Did you say secret squad of police ninjas?
Oh yeah. It’s both epic and bizarre. If you don’t know it’s a CHiPs episode and come in the middle, you’ll be convinced you imagined it. I was the first time I saw it.
Reputed to be the inspiration behind Tarantino’s Kill Bill setup, it was an attempt at a backdoor pilot for a new show that, perhaps unsurprisingly, was not picked up.
Were we all just dumber back then? How did these fever dream shows exist?!?
I am just slightly too old to have watched these but my children loved them when they were on UK television. One of said childers heavily circled a small ad in motorcycle news, “For sale, by order of UK customs and excise, Ex California Highway patrol Kawasaki motorcycle” I rang the number and the price was very reasonable, just the import duty and some storage costs. I duly put a cheque in the post and arranged for the crate to be delivered. It was not a crate. It was a forty foot container. Yep, 53 Ex
ex police motorcycles, all with the whole police kit! I still have one or two today as a reminder to always check the small print when buying anything. To anyone in England who bought one I apologise, I did say sold as seen!
Got pictures?
One of the lesser appreciated autopian bits in the show is Ponch’s 70s-tastic Firebird – it’s often a complete disaster and he’s forever trying to fix it.
He buys it off a guy who’s in the middle of setting it on fire, it gets stolen constantly, is subjected to all kinds of abuse, and at one point I believe has a ratted out interior on which his mom even negatively comments.
The other autopian bit is that Jon drives a UK-market Mini Cooper early on, before getting his much more SoCal pickup.
Every time I see clips from these shows from my childhood, I’m horrified by the visibly atrocious air quality around LA and then shudder to think how I was breathing that in day in and day out.
I was about to comment that CHiPs is my go-to when I want to show someone just how amazingly bad our air quality was back then. The horizon shots over the city really highlighted the smog, and many of the overhead shots of cars on the highway point out the black streak of oil down the middle from the days of downtubes for crankcase pressure —and why we use pcv valves now.
The NorCal fires of a few years ago really brought back those good time memories of growing up in the 1970s LA Basin and its choking first degree smog alert days.
At least the fire smoke had a lot less lead.
As a kid watching this show, I always felt smart because I could tell a big car crash was coming, because there’d be some absolute rusted-out POS on the road near our heroes. No way that’d be there if it wasn’t about to do a flip or something, was my reasoning.
Its like watching the opening credits to Murder, She Wrote and immediately knowing who the murderer is based on how famous the guest actor is for that episode
Our neighbor worked in Hollywood in the 70’s and he once told that there could not have been a better time. His statement was basically that there was money and coke and no AIDS or internet. What a glorious time.
Also no #metoo.
You want the part? You know what to do!
The Season 2 disco-fied theme to “CHiPs” is a certified banger.
How could you not have included a clip from the roller disco super-episode?
A local radio station uses it as the tune for its traffic reports and it always makes my day.
I watched the crap out of CHiPs, Dukes, A-Team, Airwolf, Knightrider as a kid and teen.
Went back to watch some episodes as an adult and it was then I realized all these shows had like 5 plots/scripts they just changed the guest star character names around and shuffled and repeated.
CHiPs was the best as a teenager!
The episode which stuck with me most was there was one of those big crashes but they could not figure out how it started. so they recreated the entire scene 1 year to the day with all the exact cars on the highway. Then discovered there was a Mirror truck (of course) going on the overpass and the sun hit it just right to blind the driver and he did one of those famous panic swerves. classic
One of the few specific episodes I remember!
Yep!
I remember the one with the MAIT team crash. That episode was also notable for the blatant display of sexism whereby the crash was blamed on the lady cop because clearly a woman had to be at fault because she can’t drive. The entire episode was Ponch and John trying to prove that wasn’t true, despite her clearly being left of center at a very inopportune moment.
(Turned out there was a construction site nearby that was moving a large piece of glass or mirror. At that exact moment the sun and glass was perfectly positioned to reflect into the truck driver’s eyes, blinding him and causing him to serve violently out of control. God damn I love that show. Thank god they still show it on MeTV or AntennaTV or something).
I grew up in California in that era and do not recall pairs of CHP motorcycles riding together. The wrecks in this show were why I couldn’t (wouldn’t) watch this show. Just ridiculous.
I like the auto-opening rear door of that Dodge van in the first clip.
I don’t know the geography of LA, but they sure show a lot of shots of them patrolling through LA. CHP had jurisdiction on state highways and interstates, and other roads where there wasn’t a police department. I remember in Sacramento County, CHP had primary jurisdiction on all of the non-city roads, with the Sheriff’s deparment being secondary.
I remember coming down the mountains into Sacramento after a skiing trip, those Dodge Monacos were sure easy to spot with their headlight pattern.
That camper clip shows the “free your arm from a combine” steering practice the best!
And it’s always best to slip your bitch pot (that’s the tar heating trailer) with violent steering inputs.
I love how they were just “staged” right where needed on that MG chase.
Late 70s/early 80s was peak vehicle based TV, pretty much all cringeworthy, but great for a vehicle obsessed kid like me. CHiPs, Knight Rider, Airwolf, Dukes of Hazard, BJ and the Bear.
Even shows not based around the vehicle had cool hero cars (A-Team, Fall Guy, Magnum PI, Miami Vice).
Shows today don’t have cool vehicles any more. (The Aztek in Breaking Bad doesn’t count.)
The Impala in Supernatural. But, yeah, very few cool car shows.
There’s a couple NBC shows from a few years back, all forgettable, that each had the protagonist driving a yellow-and-primer ‘77 Ranchero. I wonder who at NBC owned that thing and also why it was a requirement on those shows? The only series I can name for sure was The Last Man on Earth, but it showed up in several others as well.
It looks like one of the LA picture car companies (Cinema Vehicle Services) has a lock on ratty gold Rancheros, which is probably why they keep popping up. It’s a “That Guy” of cars.
https://pics.imcdb.org/9656/rancheros-cvs.jpg
And before David’s YJ Wrangler was featured in Jurassic Park, it was MacGyver’s ride of choice (often with no doors).
The Dodge Tradesman in the first clip is sweet. From the amount of body roll I’d guess it’s a B100 or B200 not the 1 ton B300.
Circa 1980, we went to California on a Vacation. We have a relative who was a terrific hair stylist (did hair for many celebrities), so she treated my sister to a ‘do. I was waiting outside in the parking lot (I was about 11 or so) and who pulled up in a brown Corniche Convertible? Eric Effing Estrada! And he had a dog with him! He couldn’t have been cooler…
We were all laughing with you this time. Normally, we laugh at you, but this was funny. The mom suddenly being thrown out the door while dad leaned slightly to that side makes me suspect she liked her odds better outside the vehicle. Why else would the door fail just before they go over an embankment?
(Who am I kidding? Normally we laugh at David. But this is an article referencing something from pop culture, so he was lost before the first sentence.)
The way that guy was sawing at the wheel, it was his express intention to get his wife, his kids, the camper with the mattresses strapped to it, *everything* out of the truck and into the ditch, ASAP.
Also, bonus points to Torch for using (inventing?) the adjective ‘muppety’ to describe that guy. I laughed hard.
I was in college and then the military during CHiPs’ network run so I missed this, but it perfectly explains my younger brother.
Most TV shows of that era were embarrassing. Never watched CHiPs, just a glimpse while looking for Rockford Files. One thing of note,70s&80s cars although crap suspension wise, easily hopped over curbs due to actual side walls. Try that with today’s low profile and will probably total it.
Yeah, thought about the sidewalls when watching Barbie. There was a car chase involving a Blazer EV, and it definitely should have destroyed something jumping a curb at speed.
Rockford Files definitely holds up, have binge watched it recently and can confirm, but that’s one of the exceptions. Although I think James Garner’s series ending injuries kind of came at a fortuitous time, since the premise was starting to get a little tired toward the end
You mean like when Gretchen Corbett left and Jim instead had a new disbarred attorney friend Coop provide the legal angles? Just odd.
The OG Magnum PI also holds up quite well. I’ve watched it fairly regularly since its original run, and ’80s fashion aside, it’s still got the right mix of action and fun. Not surprising perhaps given that Selleck wanted to mimic the Rockford ethos.
Man, stunt men really earned their money back then.
Honestly, the one with the MG Midget just looked like an ad for the MG Midget.
By the mid-80’s California finally outlawed the towing of hidden ramps behind your vehicle. Pipe ramps hidden behind bushes and dirt piles took a few more years to work out.
Also, CARB took a very long time to ban filling the entire interior of vehicles with plastic bags full of gasoline strapped to hair trigger incendiary devices, that’s a tuner fad I’ve never understood.
Turbans $2.95!! man the 70’s were great.
“Look out! It’s gonna blow!”
The blond dude is Larry Wilcox, and for one year,Tom Reilly.
And also Bruce Penhall, national speedway champ!
“people suffering from intense cognitive impairments as a result of leaded gasoline”
NAILED IT. And it applies to a lot of issues we’re facing today, as well.
One of my favorite charts is the lead/crime chart showing the correlation: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/mcs/media/images/74298000/gif/_74298891_lead_crime_gra624.gif
Shhhh, don’t tell a certain political party that youth crime is WAY down from the ’70’s. You’ll screw up their narrative.
“When unsure of what to do, stomp on the throttle, scream, and saw your steering wheel back and forth, with the same careful precision you may use were you attempting to free your arm from a combine. If possible, clench your eyes shut. Barriers, cliffsides, and trucks should all be targeted and driven towards without fail, at maximum speed.”
Pretty sure this is just SOP for Washington DC & northern Virginia.