That Magnum episode was also a major inflection point for the character. Magnum always seemed to be this happy go lucky slacker/loser.
"Did you see the Sunrise" reminded us Magnum was also a frogman and a stone killer. The slacker personality was how he was dealing with a VERY dark side. In retrospect, it was Magnum's coping mechanism for PTSD.
I think that particular episode of Magnum PI is why I disliked the "New Magnum" so much. I knew... I knew how much better the writing could be because I had seen it before. It's difficult to forgive consistently mediocre writing when you've seen great writing.
When I was 4 YO, I had already learned to read. And my parents did one of those parental things that you don't understand until years later- They put their TV in the attic. And left it there. It was 1965.
The local grade school & high school had pretty decent libraries & mom would take us kids to the big county library downtown weekly during summer vacation. And if I ASKED for a book that wasn't available (before I had my own sumber job & etc. income), they got it for me, never quibbled. They also left all their college texts where I could reach them & I did. Psychology, electrical engineering & physics.
Upside: 99th percentile verbal on the SAT. I know a few thing, occasionally they're even useful. And I can write if required.
Downside: How many of your conversations with other kids at school were about last night's TV show?
We didn’t have a TV in the house until I was, I think, 13. By that time I was a reading addict, though I watched a good deal of TV too. I’m not sure whether my first adolescent crush was Yvonne Craig (Batgirl) or Diana Rigg (Emma Peel). But my folks read to me at bedtime every night I can recall until I started finishing to books the next day, which they found frustrating. They had a lot of odd reading around the house, too; THE SPACE CHILD’S MOTHER GOOSE, WHERE DID YOU GO? OUT. WHAT DID YOU DO? NOTHING., PARKINSON’S LAW, and similar weirdness. My father introduced me to Kipling’s STALKY & CO., which gave me a love of Kipling that lasts to this day.
This... We had tv on and off from maybe 9 or 10 years old. Or we lived with someone that did. By that time though I was a 5 to 10 book a week reader which started at 7, 2nd grade. I would get bored with tv and go back to my book. Books didn't have advertising.
"The fact is I am a compulsive reader. Thirty-five cents’ worth of Gold Medal Original will put me right to sleep. Or Perry Mason. But I’ll read the ads in an old Paris-Match that has been used to wrap herring before I’ll do without."
One of the smartest things my mother ever did was let my brother and I stay up half an hour past our bedtime but only if we spent it reading. We’re both still avid readers today.
One of my classmates had her parents remove the TV from the family room. For my family we always had access to the TV, but we were also a family of readers. My parents had me hooked on reading as a primary source of entertainment by the time I was 8. Being an only child, and going to work with Dad and Grandpa during the summers I was left to entertain myself quite a bit, which typically involved me reading a book.
In '82 I was production manager at a custom photo lab. In high school (1967 grad) any conversations about TV tended toward "Did you hear Cronkite last night?" and "WTF is Johnson doing in [Viet Nam, Africa]?" "Rather's an ##@$$@, maybe one of the Marines will shoot him."
I didn't see that episode, aamof I caught most of Magnum in re-runs. For the record, Magnum was right to shoot him. Also for the record, "Ivan" was a Hollyweird KGB agent. A real one would have shot Magnum at the first opportunity.
I remember watching that Miami Vice episode. Yeah, that series changed a lot of things, not just with that episode.
Never saw that particular Magnum PI Episode. At that time I was at flight school and didn't have a TV in the BOQ room, and was quite likely flying at the time or otherwise engaged.
I had been mildly interested in Japanese animation since the SPEED RACER days, and was tangentially aware that a lot of it was watered down for American viewers. But in the 1980’s a company called Harmony Gold cobbled together a show called ROBOTECH from a few different Japanese shows. Very usual, except in the first season, early, the hero’s big brother figure took his fighter up to combat the aliens and came down in a fireball. Not only was he dead, his death affected the rest of the characters for the rest of the season (season 2 was a time-jump). What? Major good guy characters can die? G.I. Joe, call your office.
Harmony Gold made a hash of a lot of the Japanese Animation they brought over, but I think their decision to leave that death in was an inflection point that helped lead to the explosion of Anime interest.
Agreed. Roy's death made me realize that all the other cartoons I loved (GI Joe, Transformers, He Man, etc) treated me like a kid. Sure, I WAS a kid, but here was a show that didn't treat me like it.
Plus, it had really cool airplanes. And the scene in the first episode where Roy talks about being part of the development of the Veritechs was the first time 8yo me realized that all those cool machines I loved were built by people. Talking about inflection points - that scene has a lot to do with why I ended up as an aerospace engineer.
That’s really cool. I had slightly gone off Anime when I learned that STARBLAZERS had nerfed SPACE BATTLE SHIP YAMATO to the extent that it had. That was before I learned that the Japanese fascination with the 47 Loyal Retainers meant that a LOT of Anime ended with everybody dying, and it became tiresome. Some character deaths are narrative necessity, but bleak for the sake of bleak turns me right off.
I do. Not a lot. Most of my family aren't really into it, so mostly only alone and when I don't have something else I'm into. But I'll never give up my mecha shows entirely. :)
But my family are all fans of Avatar, the Last Airbender. Which isn't exactly anime, but is pretty close. Fans enough that all our cars are named after ATLA characters. Aapa, Iroh, Sokka, Yue, Zuko. And the robot vacuum is named Momo.
Did anyone ever put you on to GHOST IN THE SHELL; STAND ALONE COMPLEX? There’s quite an extensive GITS franchise, but the two seasons of STAND ALINE COMPLEX plus one movie (SOLID STATE SOCIETY) are really good actual science fiction. That is, they assume a few, not too wild, technological developments and then ask “what does this do to society?”.
I remember both episodes. While the Magnum PI episode was jarring at the time, it fit in with much of my family's attitude regarding such things. For me, the Miami Vice episode is actually more memorable for the way it was presented. Bruce McGill was/is a favorite actor of mine, ever since I saw Animal House. And the song playing during the lead up to the reveal is among my all time favorites, Brothers In Arms by Dire Straits.
I always found Miami Vice to be more of a sensory story, with cannily crafted visuals, and contemporary audio that set a tone for the scene, rather than just a straight up procedural cop show.
Back in the '00's I rewatched a bunch of series from my childhood, like Magnum PI, Simon & Simon, Remington Steele, etc., and found that the Magnum PI episodes held up in their storytelling much better than the others for most of its episodes.
Not the same, but the single episode of a series that brought me up short was the final episode of St. Elsewhere (the snow globe). I guess it was kind of a gimmick, but it was a great gimmick.
Also different but somewhat related: My dad (RIP) was a big Gunsmoke fan, and he said one of the things he thought was really honest about the show is that the bad guy would occasionally get away.
Now that it's been brought up I remember that episode. Funnily enough it really didn't register one way or the other over time. I think though that was more a result of my reading than anything else. By then I had read thousands of westerns, scifi, fantasy, mystery, fiction and nonfiction etc... the styles ranged from clean juvenile such as Heinlein's early works to the very humanistic style of his later works. The violence in them ranging from the sanitized Louis Lamour or David Drake to the darker stuff such as John D McDonald's Travis Magee series, Don Pendeltons Mack Bolans Executioner series. Then drop in a bunch of non fiction of world events and history in books that get really dark. Most of it just slides off my mind until you get to the really sick psycho shit, with mental games, torture etc... not a happy camper their. At this point I've read over 50,000 books and a lot of it bleeds together as my memory gets worse.
Thanks for those insights. I knew I was missing something in the ending of Archer S2.E9.
I was on the young side for Magnum P.I. and Miami Vice. Though I sure enjoyed sneaking in viewings when I could. I'll put those on the list to back fill the cultural gaps. Modern options aren't exactly crowding out the classics these days.
Hans Gruber is why I have a H&K P7M8. And a screen appearance with The Terminator was probably responsible for my owning a Sterling AR-180, though I lie to myself about how I appreciated the innovative operating system... Bad guys got the BEST looking weapons?
That Magnum episode was also a major inflection point for the character. Magnum always seemed to be this happy go lucky slacker/loser.
"Did you see the Sunrise" reminded us Magnum was also a frogman and a stone killer. The slacker personality was how he was dealing with a VERY dark side. In retrospect, it was Magnum's coping mechanism for PTSD.
I do think the magnum episode had possibly the biggest effect of any single episode on the culture. Everyone remembers it.
I think that particular episode of Magnum PI is why I disliked the "New Magnum" so much. I knew... I knew how much better the writing could be because I had seen it before. It's difficult to forgive consistently mediocre writing when you've seen great writing.
When I was 4 YO, I had already learned to read. And my parents did one of those parental things that you don't understand until years later- They put their TV in the attic. And left it there. It was 1965.
The local grade school & high school had pretty decent libraries & mom would take us kids to the big county library downtown weekly during summer vacation. And if I ASKED for a book that wasn't available (before I had my own sumber job & etc. income), they got it for me, never quibbled. They also left all their college texts where I could reach them & I did. Psychology, electrical engineering & physics.
Upside: 99th percentile verbal on the SAT. I know a few thing, occasionally they're even useful. And I can write if required.
Downside: How many of your conversations with other kids at school were about last night's TV show?
We didn’t have a TV in the house until I was, I think, 13. By that time I was a reading addict, though I watched a good deal of TV too. I’m not sure whether my first adolescent crush was Yvonne Craig (Batgirl) or Diana Rigg (Emma Peel). But my folks read to me at bedtime every night I can recall until I started finishing to books the next day, which they found frustrating. They had a lot of odd reading around the house, too; THE SPACE CHILD’S MOTHER GOOSE, WHERE DID YOU GO? OUT. WHAT DID YOU DO? NOTHING., PARKINSON’S LAW, and similar weirdness. My father introduced me to Kipling’s STALKY & CO., which gave me a love of Kipling that lasts to this day.
This... We had tv on and off from maybe 9 or 10 years old. Or we lived with someone that did. By that time though I was a 5 to 10 book a week reader which started at 7, 2nd grade. I would get bored with tv and go back to my book. Books didn't have advertising.
"The fact is I am a compulsive reader. Thirty-five cents’ worth of Gold Medal Original will put me right to sleep. Or Perry Mason. But I’ll read the ads in an old Paris-Match that has been used to wrap herring before I’ll do without."
-R.A. Heinlein
I had the TV on a lot as a kid. But it was usually for background as I read something.
One of the smartest things my mother ever did was let my brother and I stay up half an hour past our bedtime but only if we spent it reading. We’re both still avid readers today.
One of my classmates had her parents remove the TV from the family room. For my family we always had access to the TV, but we were also a family of readers. My parents had me hooked on reading as a primary source of entertainment by the time I was 8. Being an only child, and going to work with Dad and Grandpa during the summers I was left to entertain myself quite a bit, which typically involved me reading a book.
In '82 I was production manager at a custom photo lab. In high school (1967 grad) any conversations about TV tended toward "Did you hear Cronkite last night?" and "WTF is Johnson doing in [Viet Nam, Africa]?" "Rather's an ##@$$@, maybe one of the Marines will shoot him."
I didn't see that episode, aamof I caught most of Magnum in re-runs. For the record, Magnum was right to shoot him. Also for the record, "Ivan" was a Hollyweird KGB agent. A real one would have shot Magnum at the first opportunity.
Both episodes cut through to a significant question: What is Just? After that: What is Justice?
I still remember a comment I ran across decades ago: "At what point does Justice become Just Us?"
Michael Mann doesn't get enough credit as a director.
I remember watching that Miami Vice episode. Yeah, that series changed a lot of things, not just with that episode.
Never saw that particular Magnum PI Episode. At that time I was at flight school and didn't have a TV in the BOQ room, and was quite likely flying at the time or otherwise engaged.
I had been mildly interested in Japanese animation since the SPEED RACER days, and was tangentially aware that a lot of it was watered down for American viewers. But in the 1980’s a company called Harmony Gold cobbled together a show called ROBOTECH from a few different Japanese shows. Very usual, except in the first season, early, the hero’s big brother figure took his fighter up to combat the aliens and came down in a fireball. Not only was he dead, his death affected the rest of the characters for the rest of the season (season 2 was a time-jump). What? Major good guy characters can die? G.I. Joe, call your office.
Harmony Gold made a hash of a lot of the Japanese Animation they brought over, but I think their decision to leave that death in was an inflection point that helped lead to the explosion of Anime interest.
Agreed. Roy's death made me realize that all the other cartoons I loved (GI Joe, Transformers, He Man, etc) treated me like a kid. Sure, I WAS a kid, but here was a show that didn't treat me like it.
Plus, it had really cool airplanes. And the scene in the first episode where Roy talks about being part of the development of the Veritechs was the first time 8yo me realized that all those cool machines I loved were built by people. Talking about inflection points - that scene has a lot to do with why I ended up as an aerospace engineer.
That’s really cool. I had slightly gone off Anime when I learned that STARBLAZERS had nerfed SPACE BATTLE SHIP YAMATO to the extent that it had. That was before I learned that the Japanese fascination with the 47 Loyal Retainers meant that a LOT of Anime ended with everybody dying, and it became tiresome. Some character deaths are narrative necessity, but bleak for the sake of bleak turns me right off.
Do you still watch Anime to any extent?
I do. Not a lot. Most of my family aren't really into it, so mostly only alone and when I don't have something else I'm into. But I'll never give up my mecha shows entirely. :)
But my family are all fans of Avatar, the Last Airbender. Which isn't exactly anime, but is pretty close. Fans enough that all our cars are named after ATLA characters. Aapa, Iroh, Sokka, Yue, Zuko. And the robot vacuum is named Momo.
Did anyone ever put you on to GHOST IN THE SHELL; STAND ALONE COMPLEX? There’s quite an extensive GITS franchise, but the two seasons of STAND ALINE COMPLEX plus one movie (SOLID STATE SOCIETY) are really good actual science fiction. That is, they assume a few, not too wild, technological developments and then ask “what does this do to society?”.
I'll second that one. Plus, some good characters & action.
Oh, great characters. Good animation and the English dub - which my wife prefers - is good, which isn’t always the case.
I remember both episodes. While the Magnum PI episode was jarring at the time, it fit in with much of my family's attitude regarding such things. For me, the Miami Vice episode is actually more memorable for the way it was presented. Bruce McGill was/is a favorite actor of mine, ever since I saw Animal House. And the song playing during the lead up to the reveal is among my all time favorites, Brothers In Arms by Dire Straits.
I always found Miami Vice to be more of a sensory story, with cannily crafted visuals, and contemporary audio that set a tone for the scene, rather than just a straight up procedural cop show.
Back in the '00's I rewatched a bunch of series from my childhood, like Magnum PI, Simon & Simon, Remington Steele, etc., and found that the Magnum PI episodes held up in their storytelling much better than the others for most of its episodes.
Not the same, but the single episode of a series that brought me up short was the final episode of St. Elsewhere (the snow globe). I guess it was kind of a gimmick, but it was a great gimmick.
Also different but somewhat related: My dad (RIP) was a big Gunsmoke fan, and he said one of the things he thought was really honest about the show is that the bad guy would occasionally get away.
Now that it's been brought up I remember that episode. Funnily enough it really didn't register one way or the other over time. I think though that was more a result of my reading than anything else. By then I had read thousands of westerns, scifi, fantasy, mystery, fiction and nonfiction etc... the styles ranged from clean juvenile such as Heinlein's early works to the very humanistic style of his later works. The violence in them ranging from the sanitized Louis Lamour or David Drake to the darker stuff such as John D McDonald's Travis Magee series, Don Pendeltons Mack Bolans Executioner series. Then drop in a bunch of non fiction of world events and history in books that get really dark. Most of it just slides off my mind until you get to the really sick psycho shit, with mental games, torture etc... not a happy camper their. At this point I've read over 50,000 books and a lot of it bleeds together as my memory gets worse.
Thanks for those insights. I knew I was missing something in the ending of Archer S2.E9.
I was on the young side for Magnum P.I. and Miami Vice. Though I sure enjoyed sneaking in viewings when I could. I'll put those on the list to back fill the cultural gaps. Modern options aren't exactly crowding out the classics these days.
Thanks.
I never bought a gun based on a TV show, but I drank Plymouth Gin for years because of Travis McGee.
The barge type houseboat and the electric blue Rolls-Royce pickup were and are a bit out of my price range.
I remember the Miami Vice episode a bit, but to me it was just tv. I was younger then, and naive.
I remember Don Johnson's sister mentioning that he'd failed as a small time coke dealer before hitting it big as an actor playing a narc?
https://miamiviceonline.com/index.php?/topic/2076-don-by-his-sister/
Somehow it made it hard to take the show seriously, I never watched a whole episode. But that 10mm was nice... And I liked "A Boy and His Dog".
Yes! Crockett's Bren 10. The propmaster for Miami Vice must have been the only ones with 3 magazines for one.
After that, Sonny had an S&W 4506.....
Maybe, subconsciously, that's why I have Colt Delta Elites....
Hans Gruber is why I have a H&K P7M8. And a screen appearance with The Terminator was probably responsible for my owning a Sterling AR-180, though I lie to myself about how I appreciated the innovative operating system... Bad guys got the BEST looking weapons?
"I'm not EVIL, I'm just drawn that way"
I never watched one episode of either of these series. My loss, I suppose.