Ripcord

These guys were the coolest for a seven-year-old kid! My Ripcord parachute man was one of the coolest toys too, until it floated off on an air current. At the time I had no idea the main characters were 'Festus' and 'Dash Riprock'. I've had fun looking back at these old shows and seeing who played in them, and trying to think where MY mind was in 1962.

That's the whole point of the show. Every week something happens, these two skydivers take flight and take out the bad guys.

I remember first seeing this show and the 4 year old me and my friends that saw it on syndication would practice jumping off the stairs to "practice" our skydiving for when we were older. 1 stair was for babies. 2 stars were where "big kids" started. 3 stairs were for the really advanced ones. And 4 stairs was the equivalent of a double black diamond run in other words it was too high and we never got enough lift to make it so that was the eventual goal to determine if we graduated. We never did.

But yeah, it's an interesting little bit of forgotten 60's nostalgia that introduced the country to the new found sport of skydiving. It's kinda cheesy in a 60's way. There's elements of adventure, action, drama, comedy and whatever else they felt they could use to fit in some skydiving scenes. Nobody ever said the show was very deep.

If it were up to me to come up with a tag line for this show, that's what it would be. I'll say more in a later post, but the computer keeps booting me out & I want to get at least something down here.Made during a very fascinating period in skydiving's development.

So many films and TV shows today are made that make money off the merchandising end. This was an early TV show that did that. Two guys run a parachute center and help out the police, forest rangers and so on fight crime, rescue people etc. But the best part of this show was that it produced a neat toy. For $1.98 you could get your very own toy parachute made of a heavy plastic with a little toy Army man attached who would come floating down to earth after you packed the chute and tucked it into the opening on his back and threw it into the air. For kids of the late 50's early 60's this was great. The show on the other hand was pretty much the same week to week. The sky diving scenes however were authentic. Considering the difficulty in filming something like this during this time period it would have to be considered a little ahead of it's time. The late Ken Curtis who is best remembered as Festus on Gunsmoke starred in this action series.

Being a pilot (9000+ hours) and former skydiver (216 jumps) I can tell you that this show is cool yet absurd. The actors are fine, the writing was often good, but sometimes the story lines simply departed reality. I guess the writers were just trying to come up with something exciting. To me, the best parts are the stunt work. You have to remember that to get the great aerial footage, they had to do it for real with a cameraman falling alongside. I think the cameraman were the best skydiver of them all.

when I did my first skydive from a Cessna 182 (in the 1980's) I was amazed that I flashed back to the show. The sound of that engine was exactly the same as in the show.

I wish I could find it on DVD. Get some popcorn, suspend reality and enjoy an often absurd, but always cools show!

PS: I think Larry Pannell was a better actor than Hollywood ever let him be.