HAWAII FIVE-O LOSSES CONTINUE TO MOUNT

[gregg75]

He was merely stating an opinion and as that is the purpose of this board, he has a right to state it, even if you don't like it.

One again, there you go criticizing the poster instead of the post, with some wise crack, smart A#$ remark.

 

[vchimpanzee]

I saw the move "Diamond Head" over the weekend. It's all about racism.

I'm wondering if this show deals with that.

Charlton Heston was a wealthy widower in 1959 who didn't want his sister marrying a full-blooded Hawaiian. The fiance's mother didn't like that either because there were only a few hundred pure Hawaiians left, though she had married a white man and had a son.

Heston was carring on with an Asian girl and got her pregnant (no pill bakc then). He didn't want a son because his other son and his wife had died. He ddin't really want to marry the girl either.

 

[landtuna]

And now KPHO (channel 5 in Phoenix) has co-opted Hawaii 5-0. Following the program they come on with a "news" show dedicated to the general subject of illegal immigration/smuggling.

Tonight's episode - car chases through the wilds of Arizona's Sonoran Desert.*

Be there!

* - guess the freeways are too clogged for Suburbans to make a getaway.

 

[vr518]

I agree with landtuna. I never liked the original show. If you're doing a remake, find one that really deserves it.

And if you're going to promote a show "as if it's the second coming" which CBS did, you sure as hell had better deliver.

What didn't you like about the original series? It was a well-written, well-acted show, and was very entertaining. It doesn't deserve to be remained because it was fine the first time. If they did a sequel series with different characters, that would be different, instead of revisioning and reusing the same characters, but with different actors.

 

[landtuna]

What didn't you like about the original series? It was a well-written, well-acted show, and was very entertaining. It doesn't deserve to be remained because it was fine the first time. If they did a sequel series with different characters, that would be different, instead of revisioning and reusing the same characters, but with different actors.

We all have opinions and mine differs from yours almost in total. The original 5-0 had great lead-in music, excellent background photography and a *for the time* fantastic location. Everybody loved Hawaii back in the 60's. But I had been there and aside from some great beaches it was less than impressive. But now we get to the negatives....

The cast was high school stage play quality. Jack Lord couldn't act his way out of a paper bag and the continual close-up's of his iron face and cement hair were soap opera comical.

James MacArthur probably got the part because his mother was Helen Hayes and he was reasonably good looking (like Lord). But he was a gofer. His small part never grew and neither did he.

The other characters were stereotypes and might as well have been as invisible as HPD or the Keystone Kops. Kam Fong was in the cast because, obviously, 5-0 was in ethnic Hawaii yet the players were all White.

The execution of the story lines were impressive only if you also were a fan of Cannon and the introduction of Wo Fat was a feeble attempt to bring some real drama into the series. Virtually every recent police show has tried that old nugget and they all fall flat. Can you imagine a real cop show like the original Dragnet doing that?

 

[vr518]

What didn't you like about the original series? It was a well-written, well-acted show, and was very entertaining. It doesn't deserve to be remained because it was fine the first time. If they did a sequel series with different characters, that would be different, instead of revisioning and reusing the same characters, but with different actors.

We all have opinions and mine differs from yours almost in total. The original 5-0 had great lead-in music, excellent background photography and a *for the time* fantastic location. Everybody loved Hawaii back in the 60's. But I had been there and aside from some great beaches it was less than impressive. But now we get to the negatives....

The cast was high school stage play quality. Jack Lord couldn't act his way out of a paper bag and the continual close-up's of his iron face and cement hair were soap opera comical.

James MacArthur probably got the part because his mother was Helen Hayes and he was reasonably good looking (like Lord). But he was a gofer. His small part never grew and neither did he.

The other characters were stereotypes and might as well have been as invisible as HPD or the Keystone Kops. Kam Fong was in the cast because, obviously, 5-0 was in ethnic Hawaii yet the players were all White.

The execution of the story lines were impressive only if you also were a fan of Cannon and the introduction of Wo Fat was a feeble attempt to bring some real drama into the series. Virtually every recent police show has tried that old nugget and they all fall flat. Can you imagine a real cop show like the original Dragnet doing that?

We don’t have to like the same things or agree on them, but criticism should also be constructive, and not based on assumptions or generalizations. I’ve seen high school stage actors, and the cast is anything but that. It seems all you chose to pay attention to was the music and beach scenes. Jack Lord showed more range than just an iron face. He was playing a cop and had to be serious, but he also showed other emotions. He had to be tough and no-nonsense, but he also showed warmth, compassion, kindness, and fear. His character wasn’t mean to be comical or a bad guy. To say he couldn’t act his way out of paper bag is ignorant. If he really was that bad, he wouldn’t have lasted. I’ve seen episodes recently, and I notice his range was much more than being serious-faced. As for the constant close-ups, they weren’t that constant, and close-ups are normal in any show. This was no different. There is nothing comical about close-ups in a soap opera.

James MacArthur got the part because he knew Leonard Freeman, the executive producer. Freeman directed “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” and he asked James to play the preacher in the hanging scene, when the actor who was originally supposed to play that part couldn’t do it. James had to memorize the preacher’s entire speech and recite to the crowd, without messing up. He filmed the scene in one take. When the pilot for Five-O was filmed, a different actor played Danno, named Tim O’Kelly. Testing audiences for the pilot didn’t think he was convincing, so Freeman took him out and asked James if he was interested, and James accepted the part. Helen Hayes had nothing to do with it. His character was more than an assistant. He interviewed suspects and victims, went undercover, was a handwriting expert, marksman, naval medic, and bomb diffuser. To say his part didn’t grow shows you weren’t paying attention.

How should Jack, James, and the rest of the cast acted, then, given that this is a crime drama? Some shows could have showcased Danno more, but he did get storylines in several episodes, where he showed he was more than just good-looking and a gopher. Even gopher is not the right term, since the work he was doing was all police work, not getting coffee and donuts and delivering mail.

Yes, since this show took place in Hawaii, they had to hire locals. Kam Fong was chosen because he had been a real HPD cop, and played the role very seriously. He was no stereotype. Zulu was a strongman and comic relief, but he was given little to do because he was not memorizing his lines and was showing up on set late all the time. The characters who played HPD offices fulfilled whatever parts they needed to, but they were not invisible. Zulus’s replacements Al Harrington and Herman Wedemeyer were anything but stereotypical. They were every bit as serious and professional as they could get.

With the variety of different storylines and episodes, it is impossible to label them all as less than impressive. If you didn’t like the show as much as you say, you wouldn’t have been watching them or paying attention to them. Not every episode was perfect or well-done, especially towards the end of the show’s run, but they were not third-rate attempts either.
The Wo Fat episodes were part of an ongoing storyline, but were not feeble attempts. These were carefully-written espionage stories, except the last episode of the series, which was not written as well.

Dragnet was based in real cop cases from the files of the LAPD, so unless they had files pertaining to a real case where the perpetrator kept getting away, they wouldn’t film it for the show. Modern shows have very little that is original, and borrow and copy ideas from one another frequently.

Since you didn’t like the show, you couldn’t have watched it all that much, which explains the comments you made. It sounded like you were focusing more on things to dislike rather than finding things to like, and just making assumptions about the actors. You don’t have to like it but with reasoning like that, it sounds like you never watched it much or even paid attention to it at all.

 

[vr518]

For all of you so-called purists who INSIST the original was best and the refresh is oh-so-horrible:

[James] MacArthur quit the role of McGarret's sidekick a year before the programme's final season.
"Quite frankly, I grew bored," he explained on his website. "The stories became more bland and predictable and presented less and less challenge to me as an actor."

James McArthur dead at the age of 72

Yes, they became that way by the 11th season, not from the beginning, but 11th season episodes of the original are any day better than episodes of the new show.