An incredible number of now very famous actors played single episode roles in this series. Bruce Lee, William Shatner, Susan St.James, Jack Lord, Mitch Vogel [Bonanza's Jamie Hunter Cartwright].
They could make a special Ironside edition of "Before they were famous"
Umm....very famous? Most stayed in television. Bruce Lee, I grant you.
Martin Sheen showed up the other day with a weirdly lopsided bouffant hair style.
Yeah I saw the Martin Sheen episode but why did a pro hitman not just use the plane tickets the guy who hired him had in his hand? Why get involved with hippies running to Canada when its possible the feds have infiltrated the group? They only provided him with a draft card in his real name and a lift up to Canada. Not the most difficult country to enter from the US. He could have driven there himself. Oh and Phil gave up one bloke on the lamb who was also in the car. At the epilogue it was said he had been inducted into the army. Without debating the Vietnam war, its seems the show badmouths hippies and involves them in criminality but has a postitive agenda re the disabled, African-Americans, women.
shareSo you are challenging me to an "Ironside" dual, eh? This could get costly (probably for me.) Airports are a good place to get busted if the police are on to you. I believe the hippy deal was some sort of illegal crossing into Canada? Or maybe you can ask for asylum at the border. Can't remember. The draft card was proof that Sheen was a dodger but he claimed to have burnt it, so the hippy helped him out with a replacement. I believe the episode ended with the hippy sticking to his principles but had come to appreciate that "the man" wasn't so bad after all. Aw, bless.
Not sure the series has a positive agenda concerning women. With that new hairdo, Eve is looking more Fifties with every episode!
I just watch them half asleep on Saturday morning with a leisurely breakfast. I perk up when I spot somebody famous.
shareThe hippy episodes are the craic. Some cop's daughter smokes grass and crashes her motor vee-hi-cal at night. Only they have to have her flying down some steps into a children's playground (just think if it had been day!) Rushed to hospital, a doctor walks up to her father and the team with the upmost gravity and whispers, "her pupils were dilated, she's being smoking.....MARIJUANA!" A deathly hush falls over the team. So she's lying in a darkened hospital bed with a heavenly light shining down on her with her father close up to the camera (the director loves this shot so much he repeats it with Mark and the chief.) "So were you out with friend friends, girlfriends, or did you go to....A POT PARTY! ANSWER ME!! ANSWER MEEEE!!!!!" But he tells Ironside that he's no square. "I believe it should be legalized.... but not FOR KIDS!" So it's okay for adults to smoke grass and crash cars then. Finally, he's Dirty Harry. "We must sweep THE SCUM FROM THE STREETS!"
Hope you managed to stay awake through all that. ;-)
The hippy episode when a brother and sister were running their late fathers junk yard and using it as a cover for a car theft ring because they didnt believe in private property man........they dressed alike, adopted flower names, against police brutality [though unconcerned at maimed cop Ironside] ie usual stereotypes.
The episode you describe could be remade with George Michael.
There's a hippy episode every three or so. Remember the folk singer who got murdered? Ironside is left alone in a room of flowers and psychedelia saying, "I figure she owes me a song." Please, no, not again. She sings flatter than a newspaper.
By the way, when are they going to let Mark have the full afro and start talkin' Jive? It's a sort of half way house at the moment, like an anvil. Only expanding slowly every episode. One more hippy episode and it will explode.
I spot David Carradine!!!(As a hippy, natch.) "I stepped on an ant....and I cried. I stepped on a flower, it withered.....I cried." HA!
shareI spot David Soul. And Ensign Chekov!!!!!! He and his grass merchant accomplice made up to look like Simon and Garfunkel. The producer's little in-joke, no doubt. Rather like the political idealist purloining dynamite for a plot to blow up an establishment building sporting a preposterous Guy Fawkes beard.
Even Ed has had a Vidal Sassoon make-over. Either that or it's a toupe. Trouble is, he had the same new style during a flashback to his rookie days. Kubrick would never had stood for the lapse!
Of course there's a hippie episode every three or so. They're in San Francisco at the height of Flower Power! It was the Counter-Culture central.
S01E13 - "The Past is Prologue"
Major screentime from an extremely young Harrison Ford.
You guys bring up the murdered folk singer, yet no one mentioned that she was played by the future Mrs. Kotter, Marcia Strassman.
Also look out for Cheryl Ladd (billed under her real name, Cheryl Stopplemoor) in A Game of Showdown.
And the World's Most Interesting Man, Jonathan Lippe, in A World of Jackals and Nightmare Trip.
I just watched the episode where Ironside gets to the truth about a 20-year old case (it was the one where the victim's wife hadn't changed her wristwatch to reflect DayLight Saving's Time) and Harrison Ford played the "killer's" son. I had to do a double-take!