Pep Streebek Memories

Using my streaming Netflix I watched a movie that was a favorite of my brother and myself: the 1987 "classic" Dragnet. A comedic look at the police procedural from the fifties and sixties, it stars Dan Ackroyd as the anachronistic Joe Friday, acting exactly as his "uncle", the original show's star, named the same and played by the show's creator Jack Webb. Ackroyd plays is straight from the sixties, the super straight man for Tom Hank's detective Pep Streebek.

It was this night that I remembered how funny and entertaining and confident Tom Hanks was, or maybe "can be". I never watched the Med Ryan movies he made, and ever since Forrest Gump knocked out Pulp Fiction in most categories at the Oscars, I was pretty much done with Tom Hanks.

Of course you can recognize skill, and I enjoyed Catch Me if You Can, but Tom Hanks as a draw for me was over.

I had somehow buried my fond memories of what his movies use to mean for me. I'm talking the bad ones, or at least the ones other folks consider not his star-turns. I'm talking after Big, after Splash...I'm talking my old favorites. (Actually Dragnet is older than Big.)

The Big 3 as my brother and I probably see it were Dragnet (1987), The 'Burbs (1989), and, probably the weirdest one, Joe Vs the Volcano (1990), which it turns out is a Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks movie. I remember it more fondly...the brain cloud and a suicidal sacrifice...maybe I should watch it again, and try not to be too disappointed.

Maybe it was just Dragnet and The 'Burbs that endeared Tom Hanks to us. I do know that I fully loved those movies as a kid, and Tom Hanks was a funny guy who could carry a movie.

Seeing Dragnet again as an adult filled in the blanks that whooshed over my head as a kid watching a movie with those kinds of jokes. The first time newly minted partners Friday and Streebek show up at the skin mag Bait creator's Hefner-esque mansion, the lady on the intercom mistakes who they are, and with a throaty and sexy voice asks, "Vibrator repair?" How ridiculous, of course, but that was a joke that I never understood.

There were other jokes like that, but really, I was more basking in my pleasant memories of the Streebek Phenomena. How crazy a mostly wasted movie about glorifying the LA cops in 1987, the same shitty group of assholes that had lost their grip on the crack epidemic and fed the anger and fear of an entire subset of the city's population until they blew four years later in a major race riot caused me to remember the power that fucking Tom Hanks had over my imagination as a kid?

Good stuff. Also, A League of Their Own. I liked that one, too.