Águia de Fogo

This show was one of my favourites as a child. Everyone I knew wanted to be stringfellow hawke, if only for the chance to fly Airwolf. The characters were good and interacted well (hawke being the moody one, Dom the comic relief). The only bad thing was towards the end of Airwolfs run they changed all the characters (actually killing off "Dom" (or a lookalike)) and making String disappear giving the helicopter to the now magically rescued St John Hawke! IF you want to enjoy this show then under no circumstances should you watch the pathetic end season (aka Airwolf II) and stick with the original characters!

What a great TV show, that deserves to have been made into a movie, the flying squences are great,the cast were so right. The only stain on the series are the people that tried to remake the series on a home movie budget and replaced all the actors from the original series. This is a show that deserves to be rerun for many years to come.

In my opinion - the answer is definitely yes. I'm not speaking of the monstrous super-copter, or at least, not mainly of it. The character of Stringfellow Hawk, who is the main attraction of the show, is one you might find in nowadays shows. Not a shallow hero, but rather a complex and deep one. In fact, I found Hawk's character to be very similar to another, more recent one - that of FBI's legendary agent Fox Mulder. I'm sure many eyebrows must be raised right now but think of the following - Both characters are eccentric, isolated and have only one close friend whom they trust, both Hawk an Mulder are obsessed with a missing sibling and their lives are centered around that issue. Both have their own truth and won't hesitate risking their lives for that truth. Need I say more? Jan Michael Vincent was the perfect choice for Hawk's roll - Hawk and Vincent are one. JMV brought a lot of him self into his character, the two are one, practically inseparable. In on of the discussions forum I'm participating in, a question was raised regarding the possibility of making an Airwolf movie. I said that I hope no such movie will be made because I can't see anyone entering JMV shoes as Stringfellow hawk. All of the forum members agreed. All in all, I think that what made Airwolf the great show it was, is JMV and of course we must not put down Ernest Borgnines contribution. Airwolf will always remain a classic.

Of course, Airwolf was one of the premier action shows of the 80s and was more believable than the sugar-coated antics of Knight Rider and A-Team, because it was set in the world of espionage and Stringfellow killed LOADS of bad guys when he battled them in The Lady. The series started off as a spy thriller with Airwolf duking it out with Russians, German terrorists, war criminals, renegade US agents and hardened mercenaries. If I remember rightly, ITV showed these episodes on Friday nights at 7pm back in November '84.

When the 2nd season kicked in, they moved it to an afternoon Saturday slot. This is when a new co-pilot Caitlin was introduced. She wasn't bad, and they still did good intrigue episodes such as the gripping thriller Moffatt's Ghost, Fallen Angel and HX-1 (Once A Hero was a spectacular actioner), but gradually, the series became cornier, as the Airwolf team began helping out ordinary people and there were some soapy stories such as String falling for a rock singer. They also started using stock footage in some episodes, more so in the third season.

The 3rd season got off to a cracking start with the menacing Horn Of Plenty. Richard Lynch did a good job as the manipulative Van Horn and Caitlin proved she could be a bad*** as well. Other top episodes were Airwolf II, Annie Oakley and Deadly Circle, but as I said before, they started over-using stock footage from previous series and the stories were becoming slushy. Despite this, Airwolf was arguably the best action-packed thriller on the small screen during the Reagan era.

AIRWOLF, which debuted as a heavily promoted CBS movie of the week in January 1984 (and continued as a weekly series until July 1986); was well written, produced (CBS kicked in a great deal of money for its production) and acted. It was a thinking person's action (and espionage) show, that truely emphasized personal relationships over technical gimickery. Every week Stringfellow Hawk and Dominic Santini (J.M. Vincent and Ernest Borgnine) fetched the ultra high tech AIRWOLF helicopter from its lair in the California desert to do the bidding of Archangel (Alex Cord) of the CIA to do one thing or another, though not usually until the last third of the episode which gave time to build a story amongst the players. The stories mostly centered around SoCal, but occasionally AIRWOLF took a trip overseas (curteousy of USAF tanker support) to fight a cold war type battle. Like most show's, the best episodes were in the first two seasons. However, by season three AIRWOLF started to look tired. By that time Jan Micael Vincent's alcholism problems caused serious production delays (in several 3rd season episodes Vincent is noticably intoxicated), such that CBS ultimately canceled the show; though not with out giving Vincent ample attempts to straighten himself out. The show still had legs, and was taken over by the USA Network (shot in Canada on a much tighter budget) for a fourth season with a new cast (Barry Van Dyke stepped in as Hawk's long lost older brother St John Hawk) to carry on the CIA's "chores". For the USA show's; cold war espionage was the theme of most of the stories as oposed to the CBS show's getting involved more in current events and family interests of Hawk's and Santini's. I liked the show alot, and was fortunate to have recorded many when USA rebroadcast them. It is of interest to note that Jan Michael Vincent went from a per episode salary of $250,000 (for the 58 CBS episodes 1984-1986) to now (2002) near poverty, and is living in a minimum security re-hab type jail, due to several arrests for public intoxication.