A Team to the rescue

Sunday, 9 May 2010 Comments Off

Military khaki pants, black and white Converse, an A2 jacket, a sweatshirt or plaid flannel shirt - and a beat-up baseball cap: back in the eighties when the original show first aired it was all about Mad Murdocks gears...at least it was for me.


In hindsight, The A Team always seemed meant for the big screen: the characters, the pace, the explosions all seemed much larger than the sitting-room TV could handle.


Ultimately it was played for laughs, but the notion of a group of military-trained outlaws - essentially four casualties of war continuing their own crusade against evil - seems rooted more in tragedy than comedy.



Despite it's apparent superficiality it was in part a way of making sense of the Vietnam War - a way of reducing it to something more tenable within US culture as a whole.

In that sense it sits alongside everything from The Deer Hunter, Birdy, Platoon, MASH, Taxi Driver and even Rambo.

As the voiceover in the opening credits explained: these were four soldiers on the run from their own army and their own country-accused of a crime they didn't commit.


It provides an absurdist metaphor for the kind of reception many US troops received on their final return from duty back in the seventies.

The vilification of these characters, like John J. Rambo, also speaks of the ambivalence with which many civilian Americans regarded the Vietnam Vets in general - and in the case of Captain H.M Howling Mad Murdock especially - touches on the issues of mental illness among war Vets too.

A brand new big screen version of The A Team starring Liam Neeson will be released this summer...As long as there's a war somewhere in the world, we'll always need an A Team.

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