We were stupid children

If you were born early enough to remember watching (and REALLY enjoying) the A-Team when it was FIRST broadcast on TV, then you have to face up to the fact that you were a stupid kid.

Damian remarked that “it was a more innocent time” and that “we live in a more cynical time”. I disagree with both those statements. I, WE, were stupid children.

I was idly flipping between channels the other day and came across episode 10 of the first season of the A-Team (on DSTV’s series channel).

What. A. Crock. Of. Shit.

The A-Team: BEE compliant

Consider the main plot for a second:

The A-Team is hired to help a poor farmer and his daughter outwit and vanquish a bunch of thugs who want the said farmer’s land. They do this by preventing the farmer from taking his crop to market by making a roadblock and manning it with rifle-wielding men. If the poor farmer doesn’t get his melons to market then he loses his farm for lack of an income.

That sounds believable. Except it all falls apart on closer inspection.

The said crop is….(wait for it)…..watermelons.

Now watermelons are a fairly valuable commodity. In large numbers.

I had to choke back my incredulity when I watched the A-Team extort 2 trucks from a less then honest trucker and drive them to the farmer’s farm, only to have the farmer’s daughter state:” Why did you steal two trucks? We don’t have that many melons to take to market”.

In the mind’s eye, a truck is a huge 18 wheeled behemoth of metal and rubber. But in this episode of the A-Team, a truck means a little light duty truck, much like a little Isuzu delivery truck that drops off newspapers.

Now lets consider how many melons could go to market. At most you could fit maybe 5 melons in a wooden crate. And you could pack in perhaps a maximum of 250 crates in the back of the truck. That leaves you with 1250 melons in the truck.

In a telephonic conversation in the episode we hear that the melons are selling for 30 US cents each. So that leaves you with a total of $375.

This means one of 2 things:

1) The farmer is on his last legs and $375 will go a long way to saving his farm by helping to reduce his bond.

2) The farmer is actually not doing too badly at all and is just neurotic because he owes the bank $375.

Either way you look at it, this farm is circling the drain. The former because it looks like he only grew 1 kind of crop and he’d have to wait a whole growing season before he could make ANY money again (aside from selling the body of his mildly unattractive daughter. You know the ones I’m talking about, those 80’s women with bad makeup and the suggestion that they didn’t believe in waxing their unmentionables); the latter because if you’re the kind of person who’s going to get worked up over $375, then you’re the kind of person who will most likely (in a few years) blow your head off under a tree outside your house (so as not to leave a mess for your loved ones to clean up) and hang your burial suit up on a convenient branch so that the undertakers won’t have to hunt for something to dress your corpse up in.

At this point my brain started to palpitate and refused to consider the ramifications of my childhood stupidity. But just as we can’t resist stopping at a roadside accident to watch the gory clean-up; I couldn’t turn away from this big steaming pile of shit. Because believe you me, it got WORSE.

Here are a few highlights and why they hurt my soul so:

1) There is a scene where Murdock watches the bad guys building their roadblock.

What’s wrong with this picture: This roadblock is made up of a low wall of hay
bales. This wall barely reached chest height and was made up of a single layer of
bales. Bear in mind that this roadblock is meant to stop a truck.

2) The A-Team inexplicably need to build a “chase car”. This is probably done so that they can play the A-Team theme tune and the audience can watch Mr. T. weld for 5 minutes.

What’s wrong with this picture: Mr. T. is welding “bulletproof” plates onto a little Renault mini “Le Car”. These “bulletproof” sheets are made up of steel so thin that it can be seen to bend in Mr. T’s hands. Steel that thin will have trouble keeping out the wind, let alone bullets! Oh, and none of the plates cover the windows, thus offering virtually no protection to the heads of its passengers.

3) The A-Team pack two bales of hay onto a hastily constructed cargo bay at the back of the chase car. During the chase it is set on fire to make a smoke screen to foil pursuers.

What’s wrong with this picture: They’ve set their own car on fire. The smoke causes Murdock (the driver) to not see a bend in the road and he and Face crash the car.

4) The A-Team use the second truck as a dummy vehicle to fool the bad guys.

What’s wrong with this picture: They insist on packing a single layer of melon crates with melons in them to “fool the bad guys”. Even though it is a closed cargo cabin with no windows to let you see inside the truck. And at this point, every melon they can sell counts!! I’m not even going to bother explaining why this is fundamentally stupid anymore, just keep reading.

5) At the end of the episode the characters comment on how the melons weren’t fresh and had to be sold at under market value.

6) The A-Team took a 20% cut of the melon proceeds as a fee.

7) The A-Team stopped the bad guy by dropping watermelons on his car from a helicopter during a car chase. These inept bad guys were so scared of falling melons that they overturned their car. And once again, they needed EVERY melon they could get to save the farm. Its-called-bricks-or-stones!!

The men manning the roadblocks were expected to stop a fairly heavy vehicle going at top speed with nothing but .22 winchester rifles.

SEE?!! SEE?!! We were stupid children!!!! We never ONCE stopped to question the validity of what the A-Team were doing.

So in conclusion:

The A-Team were willing to put their lives on the line for just $75. They helped a rather stupid farmer prolong his suffering by perhaps another month or so before the bank declared him insolvent. They also messed up a perfectly good Renault just so that the audience could have a quick DIY course on how to turn a car into an armoured vehicle that couldn’t shield its passengers from gravel kicked up by its tyres.

I’m going to read an encyclopaedia now. I suggest you do the same.