Archive | January, 2013

Classic TV Crossover: Magnum P.I. and The A-Team

23 Jan

January 23, 2013

One of my favorite shows is Magnum P.I. I put it in the top tier of detective shows. There’s Columbo, Magnum, Kojak, then everyone else.

So I was watching it the other night and it occurred to me that, with only a slight twist to their backstory, the man characters of Magnum could easily have become The A-Team. They were in Viet Nam, they were a highly trained team. What if they were assigned to the classified job that fell to the A-Team? Magnum, Rick, and TC could be on the run.

This led me to thinking about what should have been a no-brainer: a Magnum P.I. and The A-Team crossover. It was amazingly obvious- the A-Team is spotted in Hawaii where they’ve taken a job and Thomas Magnum ends up working the same case. The army goes after the A-Team but mistakes Magnum and his crew for the criminals. Just look at the similarities. Think about it for just a second, it is screamingly obvious.

Magnum leader2

Magnum tough guy2

Magnum operator2

Magnum warrior2

Magnum van2

They could even have had Lance LeGault play a dual role.

Magnum nemesis2

While it seems so perfect in retrospect, it had nil chance of ever being made since they aired on different networks. (Magnum was CBS, A-Team was NBC.) Too bad, because it practically writes itself: Face pulling a scheme in the King Kamehameha Club, Magnum in the Aquamaniac suit, and I’d love to see Higgins tormented by Murdock. Just imagine them drugging BA to get him into the Island Hopper’s chopper. I am not much of a fan of fanfic so this is as far as I’ll go. I think this is one of the great unmade shows of television. Magnum crossed over with Simon and Simon (remember them?) and even with Jessica Fletcher on Murder, She Wrote. Neither of those crossovers screams “event.”  I can only imagine how excited I would have been had this actually happened back around 1985.

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My Review of Pete Rose: Hits and Mrs.

22 Jan

January 22, 2013

Of the unlikely reality stars, and there are a great many, Pete Rose is probably the least likely. And perhaps also the least likeable. Pete Rose has been out of the spotlight for years. He is best known for being banned for life from baseball and the Baseball Hall of Fame. A degenerate gambler, not only did he bet on sports as a player and as a manager, and not only did he bet on baseball, but he even bet on his own team, violating all kinds of MLB rules. Although he claims he only bet on his team to win and not lose, I and many others do not believe him for a second.

On the one hand, it is a shame he bet on baseball because he was a sure-thing Hall-of-Famer.

Career stats:
BA: 303                 Hits: 4,256           RBI: 1,314

Partial Career highlights and awards:
3 time World Series champion
NL MVP
World Series MVP
3 time National League Batting Champion
17 time All-Star
2 time Gold Glove Award
MLB Record 4,256 career hits

But on the other hand he has never been considered a nice guy by, well, anyone, and he lied for years and years about gambling on baseball when the evidence was so overwhelming that it became almost Lance Armstrongian in arrogance. So I am not too upset that he is out of baseball.

Plus as a Met fan I can’t forget the brawl he started with Bud Harrelson in the 73 NLCS.

So why does this man rate a reality show? Because he has a new, much younger attractive Asian wife and is raising her two kids. That’s it.

I had no idea this show existed and found, by accident, the second episode, which I watched with growing amazement. Pete is generally motionless, spending most of the episode sitting down or standing in one place. He is not easy to look at, resembling the bad guys at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.             death_by_face_melting
On the other hand, the network gets a lot of shots of his much younger wife, former Playboy model Kiana Kim.

Pete Rose wife

Granted, this was a few years ago, but I still have no idea how a lump like Pete Rose caught her.

In the episode I saw, Pete’s stepson Ashton joined the first day of Pete Rose’s youth baseball camp. He didn’t want to, preferring to stay home and play video games, but he’s Pete Rose’s son and how would it look if he didn’t play baseball? (In reality, Pete Rose’s biological son, Pete Rose Junior, was a career minor leaguer with a lifetime batting average of .143.)

So he went and Pete started off by giving the team a pep talk. Not only do I assume this has been edited, but I am hoping that it has been edited because this is the worst pep talk I have ever heard.

This begs an interesting question. Did they edit this to make it worse? It is horrible, and makes Pete sound like a total jerk. If this was edited to improve his speech, how much worse could it have been? I want to see that raw footage!

Later in that episode his stepdaughter, who is only 13 or 14, had a pool party. Pete spent the afternoon slouched in a deck chair bellowing questions to the young boys in the pool, like “what are your intentions toward my daughter?” and “you have a job yet?”

Honestly, that’s where I bailed out. I could not make it the rest of the way through the show. 20 minutes of this was enough. In fact, there has only been one thing in Pete’s whole life that has interested me, and it is almost as inexplicable as this awful reality show.

The best part comes at 1:18.

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