Trust him, he knows what he’s doing: Sledge Hammer! first premiered today in 1986 on ABC!
Once in a while, network TV would accidentally let something truly deranged slip through the airwaves. Sledge Hammer! is a parody so pitch-perfect in its absurdity, so confident in its audience, that it slammed down the accelerator and played chicken with The Cosby Show.
At a time when action heroes were turning into bulletproof cartoon characters on the big screen, Sledge Hammer! took the most ridiculous police tropes – the renegade trigger-happy cop who answers to no one but their own brand of justice – and cranked the dial up to Loony Tunes. David Rasche’s Sledge turns the idea of a self-serious, hard-boiled cop into something wonderfully unhinged by removing any vestigial link to reality. He talks to his gun, he solves problems with a rocket launcher, and he delivers every line with the teeth-clenching intensity of a man who refuses to acknowledge that he’s in a comedy show. And boy does it work. Instead of winking at the audience, the show doubles down and presents its madness with deadpan certainty. It keeps the joke alive by never acknowledging it.
Sledge Hammer! also benefited from some quality New World corporate synergy (like House II). Not only did it receive a select video release, but it got into the funny papers as well – Marvel Comics and New World were under the same corporate umbrella at the time, so the TV series spawned its own short-lived, but excellent, comic book.
Let’s toast all the other brilliant weirdos that got yanked before their time – The Wizard, Superforce, My Secret Identity, Whiz Kids, Hard Time On Planet Earth, Gvs.E, Nick Knight, The Marshall Chronicles, War of the Worlds, Voyagers, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd – shows that trusted their audiences enough to get it but never got the chance to find their people on video store shelves. At least Sledge got a few VHS releases to prove it wasn’t just a collective hallucination.
Some shows just vanished into the static void, living on only in the memories of those who happened to be watching at the right time on the right night. Before DVD box sets became the resurrection machine for cult TV, these shows were ghosts – you either caught them live or you spent years trying to convince people they actually existed. -Pop