The Greatest American Hero – Season Two

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+     Extras: C     Episodes: B-

 

 

After the more serious and thorough analysis of Greatest American Hero and it first season, we focus on the comedy and other content concerns of the show for this Season Two set.  The show was always a one-joke affair to this critic and two sets have not changed that perception, but looking at it now, Cannell and company were still trying to do something more with it.  However, one of the mistakes was the attempt to have more hit records by adding soundtrack-driven elements, which amounted to breaks in the already fragmented teleplay narratives of each show.

 

The episodes in this second season set includes:

 

1)     The Two-Hundred-Mile-An-Hour Fastball

2)     Operation: Spoilsport

3)     Don’t Mess Around With Jim

4)     Hog Wild

5)     Classical Gas

6)     The Beast In The Black

7)     The Lost Diablo

8)     Plague

9)     Train Of Thought

10)  Now You See It

11)  The Hand-Painted Thai

12)  Just Another 3-Ring Circus

13)  The Shock Will Kill You

14)  A Chicken In Every Pot

15)  The Devil In The Deep Blue Sea

16)  It’s All Downhill From Here

17)  Dreams

18)  There’s Just No Accounting

19)  The Good Samaritan

20)  Captain Bellybuster

21)  Who’s Woo In America

22)  Lilacs, Mr. Maxwell

 

 

You can understand the need to want another hit record and the likes of Miami Vice and even Moonlighting would do this kind of thing right by the mid-1980s by taking it more seriously and integrating songs into their shows people would actually want to hear.  This series was just trying to jump on the early MTV bandwagon, even if it did not get what MTV meant.  As for the scripts, they stayed in the same formula of dull dramas twisted by the absurd superhero storyline.  The lack of wit dates the show the most.  Why were these shows not more ironic, progressively mixing things up or just trying to be more ambitiously funnier?  It’s hard to say, but despite trying to do different things, Cannell still managed to settle for the status quo more than many of his shows should have considering their high concepts were always different.  With more shows here, there should have been a building arc, but instead we get syndicated interchangeability that hurts the show in the long run.  If Ralph (William Katt) had all these powers, do you think school would keep distracting him so much or that he could not find new ways to help the streetwise students he is reaching out to?  That is the missed opportunity of the whole series.

 

The full frame 1.33 X 1 image still shows its age, with color that is still not always great, and image definition that was typical of too many TV productions of the time.  However, at its best, the prints have there shining moments of good color and detail.  Also, the visual effects of the flying are bad, and with the flying always a joke, this made it more ridiculous.  They look like they were on analog videotaped, then transferred to film.  The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo is again a simple, smart boosting of the original TV monophonic sound, though the famed theme song is not as clean and clear as the stereo hit record version of the theme.  Extras include further new interviews where Cannell and music man Mike Post who made the hit theme song possible, a DVD-ROM version of the first episode’s script, a Japanese language track for that show and a stills section.  That is not as much as the first set, but this one has more episodes, so it evens out.  We’ll look at the third and last season when we return.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo