Miami Vice

I binged watched a couple of seasons as I recover from an operation, aside from season 1, I literally hadn't seen any of these episodes since the '80s.

My takeaways;

First season is best season, with Season 2 {which was when it achieved the height of its popularity} close behind, season 3 is alright but they messed with a lot of the elements that made the show successful and it just wasn't the same. Season 4 and 5 are mostly derp with a few really good episodes here and there.

They should have stopped with the 3rd season IMO.

Also, dang near everybody who was even remotely a somebody in the '80s was a guest star at some point, from Bruce Willis to Don King to Lawrence Fishburne, Viggo Mortensen, R Lee Ermey, G Gordon Liddy, Ron Perlman, Roberto Duran, Frank Zappa, Ted Nugent, Gene Simmons, Lee Iacocca, all kinds of names.

All in all it was a remarkable show and cultural phenomenon, despite only firing on all cylinders for 2 seasons.

OMG, bring me back. Watched them all when they ran at the time. But try to remember it all now. WOW. Going to have to watch it again.

The episode with Phil Collins as a conman is one of my favorites.

And while Edward James Olmos was really good on the show, I think his magnum opus by far was his role on Battlestar Galactica.

Incomplete thread without opening soundtrack...



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEjXPY9jOx8

Fixed.

Extra bonus...



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UmOY6ek_Y4


EDIT: 80's cover band I see often, the Molly Ringwalds, does a Miami Vice theme intro to start their show.

I'm partial to the Moya's Demise sequence from Milk Run.



Jan Hammer's Candy is nice too.

Nice.

I'm not finding "Miami Vice - Last Night" so I'll add these two which were often associated with the show...



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aMCzRj3Syg




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4ueaD22hg8

Who could forget this glorious sequence?

Tubbs gets it in.



Crocket, likewise.

The music was absolutely a defining characteristic of the show. There are several songs where I immediately think of Miami Vice whenever I hear them.

“In the air tonight”

“You belong to the city”

“Smugglers Blues”


And of course the main theme is iconic.

Oh do I have a soft spot for Miami Vice!
Only show that I own the DVDs.

I loved how many episodes had ambiguous endings.... no winners, no losers... it just was.
Like the episode where Sonny was dating the stewardess, and then he found out her dark side.

Or when Ferrari got pissed about them using a converted Corvette to look like the Daytona. Which they hilariously destroyed and then Sonny got a real Ferrari Tesstarossa ... YES!!!

Here is what cracks me up. Think about it.
Almost EVERY show could have been reduced to 5 minutes if they had Mobile Phones.

Sonny: "Oh Noes! Tubbs doesn't know the Bad Guy is on to him. I must jump in my Ferrari and race across town to save him!"

That's a great observation and it applies to a lot of 80's and even 90's shows.


There are many episodes of the X-Files where the plot would have fallen apart had smartphones been around at the time.

And one of my favorite scenes was the assassin (played by a Firearms Expert Jim Zubiena) with his Mozambique drill

I like how Penn Jilette was a goon in the first episode. He is so straight X that in the bar scene he refused to have a real drink in front of him during filming.

v6,
boNes

I'm glad to hear it held up - a lot of old shows I go back to revisit from the '70's and '80's make me shake my head and think "why did I watch this crap?" When there were only two shows competing with the other, one had only to be slightly better than the other. Or have "The [name of the show] Dancers" appear at some point.

A lot of the old tech actually helped stories - we could all relate to the urgency of having to go and find a phone. Ironically, if there were still payphones around the now magical cell phone jammer could be easily defeated.

Also, when seconds count, be sure to use a push button phone. Rotary ones are just death.

I think the best illustration of emerging technology was that scene in Clear and Present Danger where the bad guy is searching for information on the "cellulose" bomb on the very young Internet while the hero is pouring though various books and publications on the topic.

[edit]

Thinking back and relating it to today, a lot of current shows could really be improved by having a short dance number with girls in pastel leotards and leg warmers in them.

Solid Gold and Soul Train should be brought back!!!

I liked the Daytona because it was a convertible, and IMO the show lost something when it was replaced by a hardtop, even it was an otherwise much cooler car.

Any chance at a HD conversion release?

I'm watching it in Blu-Ray 720P, looks good.

Higher resolutions were available, but I have to keep the file size reasonable when downloading full seasons onto my puny 450 GB laptop hard drive.

And the Fantasy Island Dancers. Not the Fantasy Island show, just the dancers.

LOL, age difference shows

I definitely don't recall this episode...

For those who forgot about it, I present The Love Boat dancers....



They boosted ratings enough to give the series two more seasons, IIRC.

when I'm editing photo's and usually listening to the 70's music I'll get side tracked and want to look up the video's. I watched Solid Gold all the time as a kid, now watching the bands who came on to "sing" is just laughable... Could they not really play live music....

One of my favorite bits out of the whole series.

Wow, this is pretty cheesy. I haven’t watched TV in about a decade but man, this is some pretty bad acting. These bad guys are like silent movie villains, all that’s missing is twirling their mustaches and tying ladies to railroad tracks. And the music! (The Jan Hammer stuff specifically.) But, this was the 80s. Hopefully season 2 is better.

Perfect Mozambique Drill, but later in the show when his M16 runs out of ammo he looks down at the gun & shakes it.

Pretty much all of the tv shows I can think of from the 1970’s and 1980’s had campy acting to varying degrees. It’s almost as if producers and studios didn’t take TV as a serious medium back then because there were plenty of films during that same era that had excellent acting. And concerning villains on TV, I think those were almost always portrayed as one-dimensional moustache twirlers because it was simply easier for the writers. TV production schedules have always had very limited time so it makes sense when you think about it.

Yeah its definitely '80s T.V., although I think a lot of people back then, especially fast living types and major league criminals, did indeed tend to act in an affected, over-the-top {and often Cocaine influenced} manner in real life, so the corny acting in a lot of cases is actually accurate.