Hacker Cinema
Miami Vice
1984 · TV series · 48 min episodes · 5 seasons
Created by Anthony Yerkovich
The story of the Miami Police Department's vice squad and its efforts to end drug trafficking and prostitution, centered on the unlikely partnership of Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs - who first meet when Tubbs is undercover in a drug cartel.
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21 comments on Hacker News
for every episode of the A-Team, for Saturday morning cartoons, for I Love Lucy, and for Miami Vice, I give thanks.
Edit: And Star Trek, and Cosmos
In the beginning, Netflix was great. Then they became a media company and suddenly EVERYTHING they push on you is THEIR stuff. Gone are the days where you could remember a cool movie and pull it up on Netflix like Fandango or Corvette Summer. I remember going back and watching several seasons of the original Miami Vice back when nobody knew who Michael Mann was.
Not its exactly as you say, you want to watch something but its not on any of the streaming services you're already paying for. I've started to just think of a movie I want to watch, go out to Pirate Bay, download it and then stream it. When I'm done? Delete it.
Its good to know I'm not the only one who has gone back to downloading movies.
It’s interesting to think about the intersection of cultural, technology and aesthetic.
Gaming embraces most of its historical aesthetics while say movies do not. There aren’t serious attempts to replicate the aesthetic of 50’s tv (which are tied in heavily with the culture of the time) similarly, jn the eighties and I imagine prior, I’ve been watching Miami vice and you can tell lots of the rooms are cheap sets with pretty minimal props. This is on the one hand definetly not full formed, but on the other hand I’ve grown to appreciate that aesthetic, And again other art forms like painting and video games seem to appreciate all eras of aesthetics in their modern versions in a Way tv and movies don’t. (Maybe just due to expense?)
Growing up in the 70s and 80s in Germany, I've been brainwashed by US movies and sitcoms, 90% of the things I've watched was from the US - Magnum P.I, Simon & Simon, The Fall Guy, Kojak, A-Team, Golden Girls, Mary Taylor Moore, Lou Grant, MacGyver, Knight Rider, Night Court, Family Ties, Miami Vice, The Wonder Years, Facts of Life, Love Boat, and on and on and on.
I know the US better than many parts of Germany.
My wife kindly got me two books of his art for Christmas last year. They took forever to arrive from Japan but very much worth the weight. The aesthetic is a very particular view of the 1980s that was also reflected in TV shows like Miami Vice, and the choice of palette is very … Amiga. I wonder if the designers of that computer and its Workbench desktop environment were influenced by his use of colour.
i miss the all-powerful USA I did grew up with. the reagan era. the movies where we had masculine huge bad-ass stars. i want that USA back. rambo, schwarzie, predator, and all the great shows we had in the 80s : miami vice, k2000, all that stuff.
i want movies with big bad-ass ass-kicking stars. all powerful usa looking far ahead at the horizon.
I remember as a little kid, watching the Miami Vice television show introduction, seeing the Jai Alai players. It was exotic.
I can only recall a few songs in my lifetime that was instrumentals that were hits.
Apache by The Shadows The good the bad and the ugly from the same movie Ballade for Adeline - Richard Clayderman and lastly Crockett's Theme from Miami Vice.
Also Kenny G was big in my days but then they started with using guest vocalists on their music.
By watching the vintage TV show Miami Vice I learned that many people make a living out of selling an image (one of the cornerstones of Sonny Crockett's policing philosophy). TED comes to mind. Or WEF in Davos. They are all basically just marketing operations. (TED sells the hip/green young futurists and WEF plays the conspiracy angle.) Same with this science stuff here. Of course the professional scientists love the prestige that comes from such a publication, but that's the reason why they are gamed by these publishers in the first place.
interesting -- an old man that built Casinos and lived in .. Sparks.. had a son who was a good-enough skier and definitely local to Tahoe in the 80s. The son had an "ad agency" which turned out to be a front for this activity. "You have to make a thousand a day" he was rumored to say.. that means a thousand in your pocket each day in good times, or just cash moving when things are slow. What you say about Escobar and local flights, that fits. Miami Vice was a TV show at that time, not entirely fictional!
I once flew out of Miami's seaplane harbor, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Seaplane_Base , to get to The Bahamas on an amphibious aircraft; one of these - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_G-73_Mallard .
Here it is in action, in a Miami Vice episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LarDZa4qLnM .
Also today's shows always feel so overblown. Crack investigative teams operating from luxury offices that could double as a nightclub, wisecracking all day. Earplug 'comms' with unlimited range. Explosions and gunshots in every episode.
Real police work is not like this. I feel like the shows of the 70s were a lot more realistic. Columbo, Hill Street blues etc.
Even though Columbo was not really a realistic depiction of detective work, it did make it feel like work and not just competence porn.
Then in the 80s the whizzbang started with Miami Vice and its blue night skies, cops driving Ferraris etc.
The good shows these days take a step back from this. Like The Wire. But must of them are just fluff IMO.
To go a bit on a tangent: I love TV shows where it really is shot where it is set, and the location is a big part of the show.
Examples: Magnum P.I. (Hawaii); Miami Vice (Miami); The Equalizer (NYC). Where re(make)(boot)s exist, I'm talking about the originals.
On the other hand, it can be a little annoying when, e.g. in The Good Wife, NYC is standing in for Chicago.
On a third hand, I love how Murder, She Wrote represents many different places with the same backlot sets, throwing in bits of stock or second unit establishing shots.
I knew those already from being flooded for 40+ years with Hollywood films (all of them) and sitcoms, I know Cosby, Malcolm in the Middle, Beverly Hills 90210, Miami Vice, the Fall Guy, Seinfeld, Friends, Lou Grant, Mary Tyler Moore Show, Diff'rent Strokes, Cheers, Golden Girls, MAS*H (the best), Married... with Children, Three’s Company, King of Queens, Family Matters and on and on and on.
Basically I know the US better - or the image it projects - than my own country.
Funnily it was a huge letdown when I visited for the first time decades ago, as it felt just like a sitcom and there was nothing new really.
Checked some episodes from some shows I had available, first seasons, DVD or Bluray source:
Miami Vice (1984): 48m
Homicide Life On The Streets (1993): 47m
TekWar (1994): 45m
Nowhere Man (1995): 45m
Battlestar Galactica (2003): 44m
Dark Matter (2015): 43m
12 Monkeys (2015): 43m
Lucifer (2015): 43m
There are exceptions though. Legion (2017) episodes are around 50m, and several of the newer "made for streaming" shows have 50-60m episodes.
You can learn a lot from old TV.
I saw a Miami Vice episode a while back, the Bad Guy noted that the Dow Jones was about to break 1400.
It's a constant upward trail, with peaks and valleys along the way. Don't bet against it.
At my old university, we were the kind of programmers that HN and the Valley in general loves to hate: bro-grammers.
Half the students were in a fraternity or sorority, and the engineering college as a whole had its own co-ed service fraternity.
Most common topics of discussion: beer, that last episode of Miami Vice, and trading tips on how to beg professors for server time so we can complete our final projects and graduate.
There was extreme media censorship (GUKPPiW 1946-1990), but directed almost exclusively towards dissident political statements and praise of western prosperity. You were still allowed to show foreign wealth as long as you showed for example how easily Polish creativity fleeced westerners out of it. Labelling everything as a comedy also helped, still for example 'Alternatywy 4'(same director as the clips below) spend 3 years being edited/censored. Those were prime time TV shows broadcast couple of years before fall of the Iron Curtain, maybe even slightly contributing to the growing unrest and eventual Polish exit from the Eastern Bloc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5MXX_n0pfQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThD7AmKQkjg
https://youtu.be/_nmGi757fyo?t=5m1s
TV was not allowed to show anything celebrating western lifestyle. We didnt get Miami Vice, Wonder Years, MacGyver, A Team or Dynasty until ~5 years after kicking Russians out of our country. Instead foreign tv shows we had were 'Escrava Isaura' and some old chestnuts from the fifties like Zorro. Cinema was a lot better, scifi movies had little trouble with censorship, we got 'New Hope' in 1979, 'Empire Strikes Back' in 1982, 'Terminator' in 1985. Toho Kaiju movies came out same year as in the west. Of course you could get censored for something entirely not in the movie. 1984 'NeverEnding Story' was delayed into 1987 because of directors earlier work 'Das Boot'.
I once read an article which reported a real police officer's take on Miami Vice.
In the TV show, the drug cop fires his gun at least once each episode. That would lead the show's fans to expect that most law enforcement officers use their service pistols at least once per week, if not every single day.
In reality, most cops fire their guns at most once during their entire lives. That is, fire them at a suspect and not at a practice target.
I expect they draw their guns a fair amount, but those who understand gun safety know very well that one never points a gun at another human being unless one fully intends to kill them.
Once, one of my father's enlisted men damn near shot his own foot off when he was verifying that his pistol really was unloaded. He followed the US Navy's documented procedure for unloading his gun, the very last step being to pull the trigger.
Oopsy-doodle!
He's definitely not a cop in the sense of a Hollywood movie (eg Miami Vice).
He and his team are specialists. They are to cops what the Navy Seals or Rangers are to an Army E1.
The primary goal is information. They could care less about busting any given small time vendor. They want a mapping of the network of trade, origination, distribution, communication, transactions and financing. Particularly to draw currently unknown or difficult to track network nodes out into the open.
It's the same thing that has been done with paedophilia online. It's a honey trap. There isn't much value in busting single nodes. They want to see how much of the network they can map out, and the leads it provides to larger players. If this concept didn't exist, they'd desperately want to create it. Given their history of creative honey pots and how long they've been leveraging technology heavily, I think it tilts Silk Road toward being a likely sponsored program.
For me, I think working on systems and programming comes down to two different types of music. If I'm performing some system maintenance or deep system work or related programming, I find that techno/dance/trance helps... specifically soundtracks to some of my favorite movies that had techno in them are great for getting the draining mood effect that system programming can sometimes have on me. Miami Vice soundtrack has some great tracks that when listening keeps me feeling like I'm /solving a problem/ when I'm deep into the mix... Hackers, the movie soundtrack, is another good one that I like; Swordfish is another good one.
When it comes to creativity and problem solving at the development level, I find that like others here, either no music or classical music on low volume assists the concentration. Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart, etc. I truly find classical helpful... I read once that it actually stimulates the proper receptors in the brain that involve critical thinking, but I'm unable to find that link as a source. I stumbled upon classical years ago at random I think... I never liked it before then and I'm certain for some it can be an acquired taste.
Cheers