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Mar 06, 2012 Web Exclusive By Austin Trunick

Inspector Sledge Hammer is a cop who shoots first so there’s no need to ask questions later and sleeps with his gun on the pillow next to him. He’s a reckless, sexist, trigger-happy sadist, but his tactics just may make him the best man to put away the bad guy in each half-hour episode. Running on ABC for just two seasons from 1986 to 1988, Sledge Hammer! was a spoof on the loose-cannon cop archetype that was popular enough to spawn four Dirty Harry sequels.

Sledge Hammer! came at a time in the late 1980s when ABC was airing and developing some of the weirdest shows to ever come out of the big television networks: the cyberpunk series Max Headroom played on the same night as Sledge Hammer! for part of its run, and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks would premier on the network’s primetime schedule less than two years later. Like a lot of other great fringe shows, Sledge Hammer! was hurt by airing in the Friday night death slot (ABC eventually replaced that night’s programming block altogether with the TGIF lineup, swapping genre shows for the family-friendly likes of Full House and Family Matters.) Sledge Hammer! struggled in a losing ratings battle, and was cancelled after its second season.

Like Peaks and Headroom, Sledge Hammer! has achieved a cult status over the last two decades, and it’s not hard to see why: it’s a hilarious spoof, and rather unique to this day. Actor David Rasche is incredibly likeable as the volatile Inspector Sledge Hammer; his mix of slapstick and violence places him less near the ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan end of the spectrum and more toward Wile E. Coyote. Hammer’s tactics are delightfully cartoonish. (In the pilot, Hammer faces up against a sniper on a nearby roof; he uses a bazooka to demolish the entire building. Later on in the episode, he forces a purse snatcher to pummel himself with his own fists to avoid a police brutality charge.) The main cast is rounded out by Harrison Page as Hammer’s blusterous police captain and Anne-Marie Martin as his by-the-book partner. The writing is very clever, turning these cop show tropes on their head and peppering the dialogue with quotable one-liners. Much of Sledge Hammer! plays like a Marx Brothers comedy but with heavy firearms. It’s hard to imagine a show like this existing today: network television rarely takes chances as out-there as this anymore, and cable would have a hard time resisting making it edgier than it needs to be. Despite the show’s violent nature, there’s little in the content that would push past a PG rating.

Image Entertainment’s new DVD set collects the show’s entire 41-episode run on five discs. The show’s creator, Alan Spencer, had objected to the garish laugh track added to the show by the network, and had them removed for the series’ previous DVD release, and thankfully it’s still absent here. On a downside, all of the cool extras and infamous commentary tracks (including one supposedly recorded during an earthquake) on the old Anchor Bay DVDs have been removed from this new edition, leaving a set that’s bereft of any additional material beyond the show itself. That’s a real shame, but both of those season sets are out of print and increasingly harder to find, so this will likely be your only easy shot at getting the show at all. With this new box set retailing for well less than a buck per epsiode, it’s a heck of a bargain, even without the extras.

(www.image-entertainment.com)

Author rating: 7/10