Old Charlie's Angels

I was sitting here with Charlie's Angels, the old '70's TV series on. It was so bad. So very, very bad. 

I read somewhere that film schools focused on the wrong things. The writing, the acting and the music were more important than the directing.  I wonder if that's true. The show was so poorly made, would better music have helped? Maybe better or more idiosyncratic content would have compensated for the terrible form.

In this show, the girls were driving around in Ford Pintos and Mustang II's, and Bosley was driving one of those enormous Ford's.

Just better cars would have been a vast improvement. Emma Peel drove a Lotus Elan on The Avengers. Mazda later based the Miata on the Elan.

And Bosley---it wasn't his fault, but he was terrible. 1970's clothing was too tight. It looked uncomfortable and if you were the least bit overweight it looked REALLY uncomfortable. Bosley would have been better wearing comfortable clothing made from natural fibers and driving a midsize car he could easily park or turn around in. And if he were a different person. 

They put no thought into anything. They all had snub-nosed .38's. They could have broken that up. Given them a variety of revolvers and automatics.

And why were the women so helpless? They showed one of them learning police Jiu-Jitsu in the opening credits. They couldn't put in fake TV karate fights? Again, Emma Peel should have been their model.

I haven't watched many episodes. There was one where one of the girls goes undercover in a women's prison. The scene where she's first brought to the prison was filmed in what looked like the waiting room in a dentist office with the bad art hanging on the walls. The scene in the prison yard was filmed at a public swimming pool. You know how swimming pools have high fences topped with barbed wire so drunks won't climb over at night and drown? I guess they figured this would work well enough as a prison, but they made no effort to conceal the fact that there was a swimming pool. One of the angels gets into a cat fight with another inmate and knocks her into the water.

It was terrible, but you'd think zero budget filmmakers could show the same---well, I wouldn't call it creativity exactly.