An “11–86” is California Highway Patrol radio code for a bomb threat.
Which is the best description I can find for this, from Deadline:
EXCLUSIVE: Warner Bros has set Dax Shepard to write, direct and star in a screen version of CHiPS, that TV series that ran from 1977-83 and featured two officers who patrolled the highways of California armed with motorcycles and the tightest khaki cop uniforms in television history. Shepard will play Officer Jon Baker (played in the original by Larry Wilcox), while Michael Pena is attached to play Frank “Ponch” Poncherello, the role Erik Estrada originated. Rick Rosner created the NBC series.
This is the most serious Warner Bros has been in turning CHiPS into a film. The studio tried it years ago, after That ’70s Show star Wilmer Valderrama showed up in the office of exec Greg Silverman (who’s now running production at the studio). Dressed in the signature tight-fitting uniform, Valderrama merely said, “Funny, right?” — and he walked out with a deal and an intention to play Ponch. Apparently it wasn’t funny enough because while TV shows from that era such as Starsky & Hutch and The Dukes Of Hazzard got movie transfers, CHiPS stalled. The new take is envisioned as much in the tone of Bad Boys and Lethal Weapon than a comedy.
First, some explanation for younger readers: “CHiPs” was a late 1970s TV series about two California Highway Patrol motorcycle cops.
The first thing viewers had to do, of course, was suspend disbelief. The CHP didn’t assign motorcycle units as teams. The story in the pilot was that Poncherello was a screwup whose sergeant assigned Baker to keep him out of trouble.
So the two patrolled Los Angeles-area freeways keeping the good citizens of the Southland out of trouble without once drawing their guns. (Which is not impossible, but unlikely given some of the bad guys they encountered.)
The two were, of course, eligible bachelors. Poncherello lived in a motor home the first season before the two moved into an apartment complex whose rent might seem out of reach for police officers, but hey, this is TV. And they seemed to have an unusual amount of disposable income for, again, two police officers.
So what was the series really about?
The series was about getting 13-year-old boys to watch, such as myself. Of course I watched it. For that matter, when we went on vacation to California in the fall of 1978, you cannot imagine my thrill from seeing a real live CHP motorcycle! (It was at a crash scene on an L.A. freeway.)
As is usually the case with such series, the series worked because of the on-screen interplay between the lead characters. (As opposed to, from what one reads, how Estrada and Wilcox got along, or didn’t, off screen.)
There was one instance where life affected art.
Estrada missed several episodes while recovering from his crash. I recall that being really big news at my middle school.
Later, “CHiPs” had its own jump-the-shark moment when Wilcox left the series, replaced by, as usual, an inferior actor who, based on the titles, had every recreational toy in the book.
What’s stupid about this is that there already has been a remake, with most of the original cast:
The producers of CHiPs: The Film say they don’t want to do a parody, like the mostly disastrous “Starsky and Hutch” movie, but something more in the line of the Lethal Weapon or Bad Boys movies, which means they are going in the direction of the “SWAT” and “Miami Vice” movies. None of these, nor the big-screen remakes of “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “The Dukes of Hazzard,” were calling out to be made, and every one of them has been a flop. That also ignores the other inconvenient fact, which was that “CHiPs” wasn’t exactly “Roots” either, as one Facebook post puts it:
This was probably the worst (non-Aaron Spelling) show ever perpetrated on the Law Enforcement community. Think of it… it had offhand rhetoric that passed as ‘humor’, fakey crash scenes involving literally dozens of $300 cars, all attended to by a toothy latino ego-freak, a smiling blonde guy, all watched over by an incredibly inept Sergeant… oh, and I almost forgot… it also had…. DISCO.
I’ve weathered two eps. From my experience with a few CHP friends during my 30 years in California, the three leads should have been fired halfway through the first episode, and ‘Ponch’ perhaps deported after doing five years at Corcoran for serial sexual harrassment.. Kidding.
Makes ADAM-12: ‘The Rambler years’ look like Masterpiece Theater.
This happens because today’s producers, directors, writers and studio executives are either creativity-challenged or risk-averse. It’s possible as well that studios owned by big corporations, as opposed to being run by the likes of the Warner brothers, Columbia’s Harry Cohn or Universal’s Lew Wasserman, are concerned with the bottom line to excess.
It’s also got something to do with nostalgia. If you’re not on Facebook, you would not believe how many groups are on Facebook about fond memories of entertainment of the past. Many people bemoan, rightly, the sad state of today’s TV and movies, though some forget that TV of the ’60s and ’70s wasn’t always “Gone with the Wind” either. Studios are trying to figure out how to tap into that nostalgia in an era of diminishing viewing of TV and movies.
They have yet to successfully figure out that characters and writing, not cranking up mayhem and undressing of actors to R-rated standards, is what makes people fondly remember the original “Starsky and Hutch” and “CHiPs,” such as they were. Characters develop over the course of several seasons of a TV series, and that’s difficult at best to do in a two-hour movie.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 