Today, we look at how CHiPs tried to spin off, of all things, an LAPD ninja task force?!
This is Back Door Blues, a feature about “backdoor pilots.” Backdoor pilots are episodes of regular TV series that are intended to also work as pilots for a new series. Sometimes these pilots get picked up, but a lot of times they did not get picked up. I’ll spotlight examples of both successful and failed backdoor pilots.
CONCEPT: Force Seven: The Deadly Arrow, a special Los Angeles police department ninja task force
SERIES IT AIRED ON CHiPs
This was the season five finale of CHiPs and it was sadly the last episode for original star, Larry Wilcox (Jon of Ponch and Jon fame), who couldn’t work out a deal to return for season six. The “sad” part of the story is that Ponch and Jon are barely in the episode. In the start, they pull over a guy and discover some military secrets in the guy’s car.
These military secrets are then used by a special LAPD ninja task force called Force Seven that tries to take down a terrorist using the info Ponch and Jon found. The team is led by the eye-patch wearing Lt. John LeGarre, played by Fred Dryer (before he became TV’s Hunter). The team gets a new recruit, Rick Nichols, played by Tom Reilly, in this episode, who would be our point of view character if the series were to be picked up. Reilly was then later cast as the replacement for Wilcox in the final season of CHiPs as Ponch’s new partner, Bobby Nelson.
The term “Force Seven” comes from this insane sign in their headquarters:
POLICE USE OF FORCE
FORCE ONE: VERBAL
FORCE TWO: PAIN COMPLIANCE
FORCE THREE: CONTROL HOLDS
FORCE FOUR: BODY KICKS
FORCE FIVE: BATON
FORCE SIX: DEADLY FORCE, MAXIMUM
FORCE SEVEN: THE PRESERVATION OF HUMAN LIFE IN A STEP BEYOND KILLING THE MARTIAL ARTS.
WOW.
One of the members of Force Seven is a comic relief character who has a racist Asian puppet…
Dang.
So the team stops the villain, Nakura, an old friend of LeGarre, played by John Rhys Davies, and the show ties back to the main series by having LeGarre thank Ponch and Jon for finding the secrets that kicked everything off.
DID THE PILOT GO TO SERIES? No.
SHOULD IT HAVE? God, no.
Okay, that’s it for this installment of Back Door Blues! I KNOW you have suggestions for other interesting backdoor pilots, so drop me a line at brian@popculturereferences.com (don’t suggest in the comments, as this way, it’ll be a surprise!).
I did not know this existed, and I was so stunned by the entire thing that I had to post a link to my girlfriend to make sure that I was not having a stroke, or had accident ingested something to make me hallucinate.
Jesus Christ. I think I’m torn on this being hilariously awful or incredibly cool.
It’s really quite horrifying, some of the TV series that came out in the 70’s and early 80’s. But then Diff’rent Strokes came along and made it all worthwhile.
For semi related trivia, the last season of CHiPs in 1982 featured two guest appearances by Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. At the time it was the first alternate franchise that Cassandra Peterson’s character crossed over into, after she was only a year into her horror movie hosting gig. Elvira wouldn’t pop up in another TV show until 1986’s WRESTLEMANIA II as a guest commentator (or, if you prefer fully scripted shows, 1989’s SUPER MARIO BROTHERS SUPER SHOW). By then, years of her hosting show plus a film had elevated Elvira’s fame, but CHiPs guested her back when the character was still relatively new.
Wow. I would call this more of a pilot with a CHiPs cameo!
To be true it makes me think they made this pilot, it bombed the early screenings, then they just changed the credits and added Jon and Ponch to recover some money by slipping it in to CHiPs.
I mean, what this stuff had to do with the main series? It’s like The Greatest American Hero spinning off A-Team, what the…
They weren’t even working for the same law enforcement agency!
I like that the LAPD sprung for specially-designed gis with their own “F7” logos for the Force Seven ninja task force. That seems like a good use of resources.
Let me guess: There were seven members of the Force Seven ninja task force, like Fox Force Five in Pulp Fiction?
They really missed out on that, as they sadly only had five members. Too cheap to get seven members, I suppose! They spent all the money on the gis!
It seems like if this had come out three years later, in 85/86, it might have been a big hit. Ninja’s were EVERYWHERE then.
As bizarre as this seems, strange spinoffs for TV shows have actually happen, and been successful.
Picture this: a beloved family sitcom which is a period piece centering around a troupe of middle class teenagers, their parents, and a local gathering spot set in the 1950’s-1960’s. Five seasons in a SPACE ALIEN shows up and tries to get the series’ lead to go back to space with him. And it proves so hilarious that the space alien gets his own sitcom! Which runs for 4 seasons!
That was MORK & MINDY, folks.
So, as weird as this was for CHiPS, TV does have a sort of “risk/reward” dynamic sometimes. And like Dave E suggested, it’s possible it could have been ahead of its time by a few years. But if it’d happened, we may not have gotten HUNTER, which would have been a shame. Not worse than the racist puppet, though. Yeesh!
I don’t know whether Mork and Mindy was actually intended as a spinoff, though. I think it was just a one-off episode that did so well they decided to THEN spin it off. But yes, don’t get me wrong, “Richie meets a space man” is a weird concept for a Happy Days episode even as a one-off!
N.C.I.S. spinning off from J.A.G. was also sort of uncanny, the two shows had such a different pace that it’s now hard to say they were somehow related. That backdoor pilot stuck out like a sore thumb. Still, it worked pretty fine, to the point N.C.I.S. is now a franchise per se and J.A.G. is vintage TV.
I just saw this episode for the first time. Loved it! It would have made a great television series!