The JAFO console in Blue Thunder. However, in the process, one missile destroys a barbecue stand in Little Tokyo and a second impacts ARCO Plaza in Downtown Los Angeles. If I was lining up a shot that didn’t look safe to him, he would come down on me like a ton of bricks. A man who can change himself into any animal fights crime.

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And ... Frank is grounded when another helicopter pilot claims that he interfered with him doing his job. As Scheider’s Murphy walks away, Blue Thunder is hit by a train and blown up into a million pieces.

(When I’ve told people I was going to do a piece on Blue Thunder, more than one person responded, “I have no idea what that is.”) In 1984, ABC aired a Blue Thunder television series that lasted 11 episodes. The cases of a private investigations agency run by three Vietnam War veterans, armed with toughness, their own helicopter, and the third's technical ability. It’s not too hard to find it playing somewhere on cable on any given day. It's overkill especially on city streets. In 1987, Coca-Cola Telecommunications released a Blue Thunder video tape cartridge for Worlds of Wonder's short lived Action Max game system. In this scene, Blue Thunder, ... Stern’s Richard Lymangood (who is nicknamed JAFO, which stands for “just another fucking observer”), is brutally killed off by being run over by a car. Just smoke and mirrors; all plastic and paper; fully non-functional.

Most of this is plastic and cardboard for effect only. I remember seeing Beverly Hills Cop 2 and the police captain in that gets massacred, but next thing you know you’re in his hospital room and he’s okay. [11] Variety called it "a ripsnorting live-action cartoon, utterly implausible but no less enjoyable for that". “Now this war that’s going on between the Justice Department and Apple is another fun thing. Badham wasn’t even supposed to direct WarGames.

The helicopters used for Blue Thunder were French built Aérospatiale SA-341G Gazelles modified with bolt-on parts and Apache-style canopies.

", 1987 Action Max "Blue Thunder" Game Video, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Blue_Thunder&oldid=983014009#Cultural_references, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 11 October 2020, at 18:49. ("Tactical Helicopter Offensive Response"), and is secretly eliminating political opponents to advance its agenda. How are we going to do a deal with the biggest corporation in the world telling us to go f*ck ourselves?”, Watching Blue Thunder today, it’s almost shocking how much the film goes out of its way to not set up a sequel.

Cochrane, disobeying orders to stand down, ambushes Blue Thunder in a heavily armed Hughes 500 helicopter, and after a tense battle, Murphy is able to shoot him down after executing a 360° loop through use of Blue Thunder's turbine boost function. Blue Thunder is a 1983 American action thriller film from Columbia Pictures, produced by Gordon Carroll, Phil Feldman, and Andrew Fogelson and directed by John Badham.The film features a high-tech helicopter of the same name and stars Roy Scheider, Warren Oates, Candy Clark, Daniel Stern, and Malcolm McDowell. As part of a deal with an intelligence agency to look for his missing brother, a renegade pilot goes on missions with an advanced battle helicopter. With powerful armament, and other accoutrements such as thermal infrared scanners, unidirectional microphones and cameras, built-in mobile telephone, computer and modem, and a U-Matic Video Cassette Recorder (VCR), Blue Thunder appears to be a formidable tool in the war on crime.

Frank Murphy (Roy Scheider) is a Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) air support division pilot and troubled Vietnam War veteran with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Even though it looks like a “badass helicopter movie,” it’s not a movie that’s going to make a person feel good at the end of the day. But now all that stuff is common knowledge, including whisper mode.”.

“Oh, no problem.”, “It was fun though, I’ve got to tell you,” says Badham about that scene.

Still, Blue Thunder needs a resurgence. "Blue Thunder" is capable of great speed and maneuverability, can run silently in "whisper mode", and is armed with the most powerful weapons in development.

“He was two weeks into shooting,” Badham says, “and he and the studio got into another one of their brawls – they had several, I guess – and the studio said they wanted a change. The film features a high-tech helicopter of the same name and stars Roy Scheider, Warren Oates, Candy Clark, Daniel Stern, and Malcolm McDowell.

Two Air National Guard F-16 fighters are deployed to deal with Murphy, but he manages to shoot one down and evade the other.

Blue Thunder's JAFO console 00040032. It’s a strange occurrence that a director like Badham would have two movies so ahead of their time released within three weeks of each other.

Kate arrives at the news station, but is almost captured by one of the conspirators; the reporter Kate was sent to find intercepts Kate and gets the tape back, while the conspirator is knocked unconscious by a security guard. Murphy suspects the involvement of his old wartime nemesis, former United States Army Colonel F.E. ", The LAPD Hooper Heliport served as home base for the fictional police unit while construction of the heliport was still being completed. Carvey is doing his voices for comedy and the football buddies are a bit campy. The team tries to protect a girl who's the grandchild of a recently deceased mobster. [3] A spin-off television series, also called Blue Thunder, ran for 11 episodes in 1984.[4]. And if you’re thinking it would be tough to find a train company that would be willing to crash their locomotive into a helicopter, well, as Badham laughed as he remembered that it surprisingly wasn’t, “They said, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ll do it.’ Really? Co-writers Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby began developing the plot while living together in a Hollywood apartment in the late 1970s, where low-flying police helicopters woke them on a regular basis.

“When I put that mock-up of it on the train tracks and let the train actually run right into it with explosives built in and everything – there was not such thing as CGI at that time. ", "Blue Thunder – Original 1979 First Draft Screenplay. A spin-off television series, also called Blue Thunder, ran for 11 episodes in 1984. As of 2015[update], Sony proposed a remake of Blue Thunder focusing on drone technology, with Dana Brunetti and Michael De Luca as producers, and Craig Kyle as writer.

Although the film was shot in Los Angeles and real-life neighborhoods are mentioned, the LAPD did not allow any references to be made to them. ), Snowden’s revelation is not lost on Badham. After landing, Lymangood secures the tape and hides it, but is captured upon returning to his home, interrogated, and then killed while trying to escape.