I love movies. I love watching TV, too. I admit it — I’m an addict. But I’m not worried about it because I’m happy, dammit! But sometimes, my eagerness to watch everything that hits the shelves of the store turns around at a lightning-fast speed and takes a large bite out of my ass. When this sort of catastrophe occurs (and it does… frequently, I might add), I resort to writing up a sort of capsule review like this. This time, I’m checking out several TV On DVD releases from the folks at CBS/Paramount.
Look, I know it’s been a long time coming… and I also know that nobody else has ever dared pitting the two against each other (or maybe they have — hell if I know!) but I feel it’s time we took those kids from The Mod Squad and dropped ‘em right off in The Streets Of San Francisco to see how they fare in a fight to the death!
We begin with the title credits. Quinn Martin’s The Streets Of San Francisco treated us to the sights of San Fran in the '70s with cutaway sequences showing the faces of our lead actors in their “action stances” while The Mod Squad introduced us to our three lead youths fleeing from “the man” through a darkly lighted, deserted industrial location over and over whilst the “hip” theme music works overtime. The trio of kids meet up with each other, and then are seen running down the same stretch of darkly lighted, deserted industrial location again, only to have a door burst open by “the man.”
Sorry kids, but I think I would have to vote in favor for The Streets Of San Francisco for Better Title Credits. It more than establishes the location of the show (so much so that even if the name of the show didn’t give away the location of the series, you’d still know where it took place!) as well as the characters. It also gave you a glimpse of the guest stars along with the title of “Tonight’s Episode” (courtesy Hank Simms’ voiceover) and was accompanied by some groovy wakachika guitar music. The Mod Squad went for broke with its semi-noir opening, but failed to set the viewer up with a location (Los Angeles, by the way) and made you wonder just what the hell these kids were running away from.
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