Sledge Hammer! – Season One
Picture: C+
Sound: C+ Extras: B- Episodes: B-
One of the few shows in the 1980s that never got the
chance it deserved was Sledge Hammer!, an anti-sitcom send-up of the Dirty
Harry films and like pictures, misunderstood by HBO and then picked up by a
very much in trouble ABC. ABC had been
taken over by Capital Cities, so much so that The ABC for American Broadcasting
Company became known as “absolute budget control” plunging the network into a
hell that to this day it never totally recovered from. Alan Spencer’s creation had been languishing
for several years until it was picked up.
Much had changed since the late 1970s and the masculine
Reagan-era model of the hero had taken hold in Stallone and Schwarzenegger hit
films, while Eastwood continued doing similar films. The tough-guy hero free of disease and almost invincible was
trying to be an answer to Vietnam Syndrome, but this eventually fell to the
Clinton Era and was especially wiped away by the events of 9/11/01. When ABC put the show on, they added a laugh
track, which was a big mistake. Like Police
Squad, which inspired the now-ironic Naked Gun trilogy with Leslie
Nielsen and O.J. Simpson, Sledge Hammer! should have been a feature film
series.
With the laugh track, audiences thought the show was
having fun with the macho stereotypes as if it was celebrating and validating
them. The show lasted two seasons
beginning in 1986, thanks to those who saw through it and how desperate ABC was
to have a hit like Moonlighting, but the hit status never came. The great thing about Sledge Hammer!
is its innocence and naïveté as it innocently attacks the clichés and formulas
of the macho hero years ahead of most finally conceding how dumb they often
were. This was even a few years before
“Weird Al” Yankovic’s UHF (1989) did its great Rambo send-up and
macho twist on Gandhi. Sledge
Hammer! is implicit (in some ways without knowing it) what Yankovic was
doing more explicitly, questioning this image.
To do that in the mid-1980s in Sledge Hammer’s case is remarkable
considering the ideology of the country at the time.
The pilot was even directed by Martha Coolidge, who had
just made her masterwork, the 1985 comic gem Real Genius, so she was
perfect to launch the show. I never
found the series outright hilarious, but even I did not get it when it first
came on. It is a one-joke show, but
there are so many angles for which the joke can be approached that it is no
wonder the series could go on for even two seasons. It never got explicitly political, but is the last of a long line
of left-of-center TV comedies before network TV went into the dumpster. The fact that it was even taken as Fascist
shows the quandary Spencer was in and apparently from even the new set of
commentary tracks still does not realize.
The episode titles are even funny. They are:
Under The Gun
Hammer Gets Nailed
Witless (send-up of Peter Weir’s Witness)
They Shoot Hammers, Don’t They
Dori Day Afternoon
To Sledge, With Love
All Shook Up (serial killer murdering Elvis
Presley impersonators)
Over My Dead Bodyguard
Magnum Farce
If I Had A Little hammer
To Live & Die On TV
Miss of The Spider Woman
The Old Man & The Sledge
State Of Sledge
Haven’t Gun, Will Travel
The Color Of Hammer
Brother, Can You Spare A Crime?
Desperately Seeking Dori
Sledgepoo
Comrade Hammer
Jagged Hammer
The Spa Who Loved Me
As he has admitted, Spencer loved Get Smart and Sledge
Hammer! is one of the rare shows actually worthy of its legacy. Unknown David Rasche was cast as the title
character, which was the logically outlandish conclusion of the trend of this
masculine image. There are many jokes,
though some are more ironic than funny.
The famous one from the pilot is a send-up of the 1971 original Dirty
Harry as a man is ready to commit suicide.
The pilot has him with a gun. To
get rid of this menace, Hammer uses a missile to bring down not only the man,
but also the whole building! That
turned off those who were already sick of the trend, but others who liked the
cycle or at least were not offended, got the joke. The problem besides the limited political aspirations (point for
having the guts to even speak Iran-Contra, even if the weight of it was not
realized by the show at the time) that the show was barely able to keep up with
the trend it was going after. A year
after its debut, the first Lethal Weapon would repeat that suicide
sequence with a more successful mix of humor and pointedness, and it is
doubtful the freedom HBO would have allowed Spencer would have changed anything. Season Two will be interesting to look at
again.
The first 32 half-hour shows, plus a longer version of the
Coolidge pilot are here on four DVDs, plus four Spencer commentaries on DVDs 1,
2 & 4, some TV spots that pushed the show, an electronic press kit, DVD-ROM
teleplays for HBO & ABC (so you can see how they differ), stills that
feature memorabilia, Spencer’s original message to critics as the show
launched, the original bumper (the very brief thing that tells you the show
will be right back after the commercials), a featurette with the three leads
(Rasche, Anne-Marie Martin & Harrison Page) that looks at the show and a
mock file with a 16-page booklet inside the book-like DVD casing on the
show. These are good extras and enhance
the experience of seeing the show again.
The shows themselves are again thankfully missing the
laughtracks, but they are also on the soft side image-wise, all at 1.33 X 1
full frame, the way they were shot. The
Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo is simple and from a more recently recorded production
(1986 – 1988) and sounds good for its age, but there are still limits. That makes the presentation just better than
when it originally aired.
I give Spencer credit for sticking with the humor the way
he wanted to, being more subversive than he ever imagined. It was a still ambitious show Spencer and
company had hoped would be a big hit that everyone could laugh at. No one since “Weird Al” (give or take Michael
Moore) has dared to tread into this territory and especially in a current TV
littered with too many conformity-inspiring cop shows that inevitably have the
goal of having it viewers never question police power. It takes a good Sledge Hammer! to
break through all that.
- Nicholas Sheffo
