A-Team Episode 4×01-02

“Judgement Day”

• Location: Los Angeles, California. And Italy.
• Tank: Armored RV
• Disguises: Window Washer. Mafia Guy. And… Mafia Guy??
• Scam: RV, Plane, Ship acommodations
• Flight: Yes
• Fixation: Slightly Deranged Butler
• Flips: 3
• Fee: Unknown, non-free
• Quote: “I don’t believe it–you’re me!” “You never looked this good” – Mob Boss, and Hannibal disguised as Mob Boss
• Who is that?? I’m going to forgo the usual character-actor-hint format and just come out and admit it, they pulled one over on me. It took my wife pointing out that the Mob Boss whom Hannibal disguises himself as is, in fact, also played by George Peppard!
• Bonus Who is that?? Bad Guy Helicopter, Bell 222. Hint: if you ever watched TV in the 80’s, you should recognize this chopper immediately.

Here we are, Season 4! If it seems like the posts have gotten more sparse, you can thank Marvel and Mario Kart for that. I, uh… got distracted (stupid Marvel and their stupid awesome 22 movie MCU…). Anyway, I’m back and hoping to make a strong push to the end. Fear not, reader, I won’t leave you hanging. Also, if it hasn’t been clear, anytime I refer to “reader,” I mean it in the non-plural sense, not the poetic sense. You know who you are!

Onto the show–if that teaser on the main page sounded familiar, it’s because I got lazy and just recycled it from Double Heat. If you’ll recall, in that episode, the daughter of the character played by Dana Elcar is kidnapped, to be used as leverage by the mob in an attempt to get one of their own off. In this episode, the daughter of the character played by Dana Elcar is kidnapped, to be used as leverage by the mob in an attempt to get one of their own off.

One of the mob bosses shows up at the judge’s house to check up on him, the boys capture him, and Hannibal quickly replicates him in disguise form and takes his place. Sparing you the details, I always enjoy Hannibal doing a good mob send-up and this time was no exception. There are tons of great (and totally cliche) one liners. Ana Obregon’s “hot-tempered, vampish Italian girl” is also perfectly delivered (and perfectly cliche).

Hannibal is eventually busted and ends up… well beating up himself, just before being captured by feisty Marta at the point of a shotgun. It doesn’t take long for him to begin turning them all against eachother, which buys him just enough time for the rest of the team to show up in The Tank. Followed by the MPs. Followed by Airwolf. The team escapes, exploding two MP cars out of their way (I’m going to go ahead and count those as flips), but Airwolf manages to spirit the girl away. Some mandolin music teases us into the second half of our two-parter as the bad guy’s brother comes in from the Old Country to set things straight.

Meanwhile, our boys capture the bad guy lawyer (while Face seemlessly swoops in to snag his date–who will not be needing him any longer) to grab the next piece of our puzzle: the girl is in Italy, so we travel there to the tune of some more mandolin music.

It’s not long before the mandolin-version of the main theme is playing (so much original music for this show!) and our heroes have re-taken the girl, speeding and flippin’ their way to safety. Or crashing through a plane to safety, whatever. The poor DC-3 goes up in flames and what I’m pretty sure are Star Wars explosion sound effects.

We’re treated to another episode of Face Teaches Scamming, with a special bonus of Face Teaches 80’s Sexism, and it’s off we go, the rest of the ep taking place on a ship. Naturally, the bad guys have enough clout that they can actually board a cruise ship mid-journey. It’s cat and mouse against mobsters, sleazy lounge singers, beefy boyfriends, seductive temptresses–the usual cadre of 80’s extras–until eventually our heroes begin taking out the bad guys one by one.

Two parter eps always seem to have a lot of travel. For those of you playing the home version of our game, our two-parters have taken us to Mexico, the West, South America, and now Italy. As always, I love the music composed specifically for each episode, though the late 70’s-style synth was very odd at the top of this ep (that’s the last we hear of it this episode, though we’ll be getting more synth music soon enough…).

I’ve never bothered to address it until now because it’s an 80’s action show and it’s generally assumed, but this ep takes sexism a little above and beyond. We completely expect Face to pull the old “I bought you a skimpy bathing suit, you should try it on” routine–but it was rather disappointing how happy the girl was to oblige.

Highlights of this ep are Murdock’s B.A. impression and the clever sound design and camera work for the numerous scenes where Hannibal is playing opposite himself as a mobster disguised as a mobster. I really enjoyed George Peppard’s subtle acting differences between playing a mobster vs. playing Hannibal playing a mobster (who tends to ham it up a bit).