"Too cool for school" 21 Jump Street has been on my mind and in my DVD player a lot lately, thanks to my newfound freedom from writing 20-page final papers. Today I finished season one.
In addition to the theme song instantly getting stuck in my head, the first thing I noticed was how racist a show it is/was. The very first scene in the very first episode features a nice, suburban (white) family sitting around the dinner table beginning to discuss their days, the precocious teenage daughter acting up just a little for realism -- until the scene is shattered by two black men jumping through the window near the dinner table brandishing automatic weapons and Michael-Jackson-like hairdos and clothing.
Not racist enough, you say? Well, in a later episode, a local high school gets taken over by a gang full (I mean 100%) of "ethnic" kids -- black, hispanic, asian -- who hold a bunch of middle-class white people hostage. They're also kind of bumbling as criminals, clearly not having thought through the master plan (the way I'm sure a white villain would have), and the main (black) leader's weakness for beautiful women and inability to think rationally is highlighted several times. They also have the Asian cop, Ioki (whose real-life family name is Nguyen [Vietnamese], but who was cast as Japanese), run up the outside of the building like a ninja. Then he beats up the other Asian in the episode.
All this makes it less of a shock when they suddenly kill off the (white) hippie captain midway through the season and substitute a hard-working black captain in his place. Obviously some other people thought the show was racist, too.
Episodes feature the guy who plays that alien who idolizes Alan Rickman's character in Galaxy Quest, and dies; Jason Priestley as a squatter-punk kid; and later, Shannon Doherty and Brad Pitt. Also, Holly Robinson-Peete, who is currently best known for her advocacy of autism research on Celebrity Apprentice, but who you also probably saw at some point as Vanessa on Hangin' With Mr. Cooper on ABC's TGIF lineup.
One of the things that's great about the show -- besides Johnny Depp's debut and seeing him trying on 80's-punk outfits that would later be dwarfed by all his Tim Burton projects and even Captain-Jack garb -- is seeing 80's culture in action. In one episode, the (black) captain's son comes to visit and is a Rastafarian, something totally foreign to me now (though even I knew the captain shouldn't eat those brownies); the captain slowly learns tolerance of his son's new ways. The season closer also features an 80's punk-anarchy scene that seems thoroughly entrenched in its time -- basically good kids getting mixed up with punk-rock and getting a second chance, rather than getting detained as potential domestic terrorists and feared by all in the community.
It's definitely a pre-9/11, pre-Berlin-wall-fall, pre-Lost world. Even though I lived in it, it's fascinating to watch now.
You can get seasons 1-2 and 3-4 in bundle packs from Target right now for $15 apiece. Millstone Entertainment (which produced 21 Jump Street and also put out Daybreak and the old-tyme spy-show sampler "Spies and Lies," which includes 6 Dangerous Assignment episodes) is becoming one of my companies to watch.
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If you have Netflix, you can view episodes of 21 Jump Street through the "Watch Instantly" feature. They also have seasons 1 & 2 of Sliders and most seasons of the X-files.
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