Welcome to the weekly TV thread.
The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Alan Silvestri’s funky “I’ll Ride with You” from the all-star California Highway Patrol charity skate event scene in the 1979 CHiPs episode “Roller Disco: Part 2.” I like “I’ll Ride with You” even more than Silvestri’s second-season arrangement of John Parker’s CHiPs theme. We got Melissa Sue Anderson and Nancy Kulp! Lee Meriwether’s skating tonight! And there’s Robert Mandan!
When I was four years old, I often rode around the cul-de-sac on an Empire Plastics CHiPs trike with stickers of the CHiPs logo and the seven-point CHP badge all over it. This is kind of what it looked like (however, my CHiPs trike didn’t have a sticker of Boba Fett’s helmet on the seat):
As for the show itself, I wasn’t really into it when I was four. I was more into Sesame Street, The Greatest American Hero, and reruns of The Flintstones and the original Lost in Space.
When CHiPs first came to syndication, MGM Television retitled it CHiPs Patrol—an inane title because if you remove the letters I and S, it’s California Highway Patrol Patrol—to distinguish the older episodes from the new ones on NBC.
Syndication was where I first paid some attention to CHiPs, which starred Larry Wilcox as CHP motorcycle officer Jon Baker and Erik Estrada as Officer Frank “Ponch” Poncherello, his more charismatic partner, as well as one of the first Latino lead characters on an American hour-long drama and a late ’70s/early ’80s sex symbol.
Estrada gets a lifetime pass for punching out Bill Maher on Pictionary, so every time the Skip Bayless of HBO late-night programming says something racist or asinine, I play back the GIF of Estrada knocking the fuck out of Maher because it’s 10 times funnier than anything Maher ever says.
In the Bay Area, CHiPs reruns aired on KBHK-TV 44 at 6pm. They preceded Sanford and Son reruns at 7pm. I can easily hear in my mind KBHK announcer Darwin Gillette saying over the end credits of Happy Days Again, the late ’70s syndicated version of Happy Days (which was at 5:30), “Ponch and Joooooon must chase after the dastardly Phantom on CHiPs Patrol. That’s next on the Movie Station, TV 44.”
CHiPs was alright. But it was no Flintstones. The show was the type of by-the-numbers action drama you put on in the background while you devote all your attention to playing with your Lego bricks.
Five-year-old me knew who Ponch was and who Jon was, but I paid so little attention to CHiPs that I never knew the name of Robert Pine’s fatherly (despite being not that much older than Ponch and Jon) CHP sergeant character. A quick click to TV historian Stephen Bowie’s 2012 interview with Pine—the father of Chris Pine and easily the best actor in the CHiPs cast (I’m fond of Pine’s 1977 guest spot as an easygoing bank robber who takes Dr. Hartley hostage in his office in “Desperate Sessions,” The Bob Newhart Show’s amusing parody of Dragnet)—pointed out to me that his CHiPs character’s last name is Getraer.
Because CHiPs was an MGM IP, TNT—MGM’s sister platform—picked up CHiPs reruns (which were finally without the inane CHiPs Patrol logo) in 1992. On TNT, the reruns were popular enough to spur the channel to produce CHiPs ’99, a 1998 reunion movie/backdoor pilot that reteamed Pine with Wilcox and Estrada (the two leads famously fought like cats and dogs during the original CHiPs’s run, so Wilcox later left the show, but by the time they did CHiPs ’99, Wilcox and Estrada had mellowed, and they got along during the movie’s shoot). That same year, Exclusive Premiere, which made dolls of the Three Stooges, 007 movie characters, the Blues Brothers, and characters from Happy Days, Bewitched, Get Smart, and Babylon 5, released Ponch and Jon dolls that were of higher quality than Mego’s 1978 and 1981 CHiPs dolls.
One CHiPs alum who was missing from the TNT reunion movie was Michael Dorn, who had a recurring role as Jebediah Turner, one of Ponch and Jon’s fellow officers. During the shoot, Dorn was busy fighting the Dominion War over on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
TNT was where I first caught the 1977 CHiPs pilot, and it’s more comedic than the subsequent episodes I barely remember from kindergarten. In his conversation with Bowie, Pine pointed out that CHiPs’s first 13 episodes, which did storylines about laughing gas leaks and runaway elephants, were showrun by Rick Rosner, CHiPs’s creator and a former Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Reserve Deputy, and that when Ironside producer Cy Chermak took over, the easygoing tone of the pilot became less dominant.
“A somewhat more serious tone came to it,” said Pine to Bowie. “There was less of the comedy for comedy’s sake. But I think the big reason was, we were going over budget.”
But compared to Dragnet and the anthology series Police Story, CHiPs was, as an L.A. cop show, light as a feather—Ponch and Jon never drew their guns—and there was a lot of footage of Ponch and Jon’s off-duty fun and games all over SoCal. You would never see Don Meredith or Tony Lo Bianco dancing the night away at a disco with a bunch of hotties over on Police Story.
Tonally, the ’90s equivalent of CHiPs was Baywatch, where everybody in the cast (except Gregory Alan Williams—the only Black guy on the beach—Monte Markham, Jeremy Jackson, and frequent guest star Wendie Malick) was Erik Estrada. However, the footage of the highway anecdote Ponch recounts to Getraer off-screen during the pilot’s end credits sequence borders on “Reno 911! traffic stop scene.”
That’s John Parker’s first-season version of his CHiPs theme during the pilot’s end credits. It sounds a lot like Parker’s themes from Cannon and Trapper John, M.D. By the time CHiPs was on TNT, I had become a film score nerd and a hip-hop/electronica sample trivia devotee. That was why my favorite things about CHiPs when I occasionally revisited it on TNT or TBS were not the action scenes or the writing. I hate the word “copaganda,” and I refuse to use it because I can never take seriously a word that both sounds like it’s the title of the B-side to Los Del Río’s “Macarena” and makes me want to sing, “Dale a tu cuerpo alegría, copaganda/Eh, copaganda,” so in place of “copaganda,” I’m saying that CHiPs is a pro-cop show that was drably written. Instead of the action scenes or the writing, my favorite things were the disco revamp of Parker’s theme and the groovetastic score by a 19-piece orchestra in almost every episode from the show’s second, third, fourth, and fifth seasons.
Bonus track: The revamp of Parker’s theme (influenced by Saturday Night Fever’s emergence during CHiPs’s first season) and almost all the scores in Seasons 2 to 5 were the work of a young Alan Silvestri, long before his excellent scores for Back to the Future, Predator, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Captain America: The First Avenger, and three of the Avengers movies.
The legendary bassist who played the funky bass line during CHiPs’s second-season theme was Abe Laboriel. He can be heard playing bass on the 1980 George Benson yacht soul jam “Love X Love,” one of my favorite things the late Quincy Jones produced, and every Michael Giacchino score. Film Score Monthly released three volumes of Silvestri’s scores from CHiPs (the second volume contained “I’ll Ride with You”), and they’re all out of print. I’m kicking myself for never snapping up any of them. However, a CHiPs fan posted all three FSM CDs in their entirety on YouTube, and that’s how I’ve listened to those CDs.
The CHiPs CD booklets were designed by Bay Area cartoonist and graphic designer Joe Sikoryak, whom I’ve spoken to a few times (I interviewed him about watching “Beyond the Farthest Star” on NBC in 1973 for the book project about animated Star Trek shows I’ve been working on since 2022). His CHiPs CD booklet designs were as appealing and colorful as TNT’s “Lunchbox TV” bumper graphics for CHiPs. The CHiPs Season Four CD booklet had a bunch of action-packed—and pulchritudinous, because of a car wash water fight scene in the fourth-season premiere and a guest spot later in the season by Playboy Playmate Barbi Benton—screen shots from the fourth season and, on the tray card, a photo of a mess of 1979 Donruss CHiPs trading cards. But one thing that was left out of Joe’s CHiPs CD booklets was the 1978 magazine ad for a product I found out about on both Bluesky and Pinterest: one of the strangest CHiPs tie-ins that were ever produced, General Foods’s CHiPs Power Pudding.
It’s like if Dannon released an Adam-12 yogurt.
Anyway, my favorite Chicago song is the band’s cover of Rufus & Chaka Khan’s “Street Player,” which was sampled in the Bucketheads’s “The Bomb! (These Sounds Fall into My Mind).” (Pitbull also sampled it in “I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho).”) Every Silvestri score for CHiPs has the energy of “Street Player.” That’s how well-written they were.
CHiPs and all of its Silvestri-scored episodes are currently streamable for free on Prime Video, where you might start to wonder about what Ghost Robot said about the pronunciation of “CHiPs” in my favorite throwaway moment from the Venture Bros. episode “Bot Seeks Bot.”
Today’s prompt is: Empire Plastics’s 1980 CHiPs trike and Coleco’s Knight Rider and Real Ghostbusters Power Cycles were from a bygone era of licensed Big Wheels. If they made Big Wheels for adults—in fact, in San Francisco, adults who never outgrew their Big Wheels compete in a Bring Your Own Big Wheel race every Easter—what’s the Big Wheels tie-in to a TV show that you would ride around on, either when nobody’s looking or in public at the Bring Your Own Big Wheel race?
I’d want an Interior Chinatown Big Wheel. That show is so entertaining. (If I ever meet Interior Chinatown music supervisor Angela Asistio, I’m going to thank her for procuring the Yellow Magic Orchestra’s “Behind the Mask” for the episodes “Tech Guy” and “Translator.” I’m also going to blame her for my inability to get “Behind the Mask” out of my head this week because the Ryuichi Sakamoto track is such a damn earworm.)
A WKRP in Cincinnati Big Wheel or a Rockford Files Big Wheel would also be cool. However, I’d want the Rockford Files logo on my trike to be the one in the opening titles—the white font on The Rockford Files was the same one as the yellow font on Columbo and Poker Face—not the italicized golden logo on Universal Studios Home Entertainment’s Rockford Files DVD release packaging and Mattel’s packaging for its 2013 Hot Wheels die-cast recreation of Jim Rockford’s Pontiac Firebird. I love that Rockford Files/Columbo/Poker Face font.
I know what Stars (they come & go)‘s reply to the question might be: a Big Wheel with the faces of Elora Danan, Bear, Cheese, Willie Jack, William Knifeman, and the Deer Lady on it.