Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.0
Audio		2.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.5

Airwolf: The Complete Series Blu-ray Movie Review

Feel-good nostalgia that holds up even considering the series' flaws and the Blu-ray's technical shortcomings.

Reviewed by Martin Liebman May 16, 2016

Let's take a moment to set the mood.



Excellent. In a television era filled with fantastic synth-heavy theme music -- Miami Vice, Knight Rider -- Airwolf's stands out as amongst the most iconic, catchy, and memorable. There's something to be said for a great theme that captures a spirit for both the show and for its time and place in history. In this case, the synthesizer recalls that 80s "cutting-edge" and spunky spirit but also Airwolf's tech-heavy building blocks shared by shows like the aforementioned Knight Rider and the movies of John Badham, cinema's king of the 80s tech scene. Badham directed films like Short Circuit, War Games, and Blue Thunder, the latter of which is also about a technically advanced helicopter and is a movie that's all but a spiritual cousin of Airwolf, released the year before Airwolf debuted on CBS on January 22, 1984. The show aired on CBS for three seasons and underwent radical stylistic and thematic transformations along the way before being canned and picked up by USA for a fourth and final season, less a continuation and more a spiritual successor with new characters and a new direction that ended the series on a whimper rather than the action-packed and emotionally drawn finale it deserved.

Bird of prey.

Airwolf's feature-length pilot lays out the basics. The title helicopter is a highly advanced combat machine, capable of flying at supersonic speeds and built for a three-man crew, one man to monitor in-flight systems, one man to deploy countermeasures, and a commander who pilots the vehicle and controls her weapons systems. Airwolf is the subject of a much-ballyhooed test flight, spearheaded in the control center by a man known as "Archangel" (Alex Cord), who works for a mysterious governmental agency known as The F.I.R.M. and who is hosting a prominent U.S. Senator. The test flight is successful; the chopper evades live-fire targets, but she returns to base with a surprise: the crew is out for revenge against the senator, attacks the compound, and steals Airwolf, placing it in the hands of the Libyans. Archangel survives the attack and approaches a reclusive cello player and art collector named Stringfellow Hawke (Jan-Michael Vincent) to retrieve it. Hawke has closed in on himself since his brother Saint John was presumably lost in Vietnam. Hawke is an accomplished pilot and one of the key personnel who helped test fly the advanced helicopter. Hawke reluctantly agrees to retrieve the helicopter, aided by his mentor Dominic (Ernest Borgnine) -- the only person to whom he has ever been close who has not been killed -- and the beautiful Gabrielle Ademaur (Belinda Bauer), who draws out the romantic inside Hawke. The mission to retrieve Airwolf is successful, but at a great cost. Rather than return Airwolf to the F.I.R.M., Hawke and Dominic hide it and promise only to turn it over when the government reveals the truth about Hawke's missing bother. In the meantime, Hawke and Dominic carry out a number of missions for The F.I.R.M., both abroad and domestically, though their mutual agreement and understanding isn't always cordial. Season four turns into a semi-spinoff that replaces main characters and redesigns core concepts.

The series' double-length pilot episode ranks amongst the best Airwolf has to offer. It accomplishes every necessary goal: it establishes its world's background and lore; shows off its technology by making it an integral story propellant; and rather deeply explores its main characters and tests their physical and, more importantly, emotional limits. It's a solid all-around bit of storytelling. Beyond the opening minutes, little in the pilot episode is really about the title helicopter. The show revolves round Stringfellow Hawke. It's entirely his narrative arc, telling his story and placing the pieces necessary to build up the emotional resonance needed for both the episode's climax -- again one of the best the series has to offer, thematically and structurally alike -- and to better solidify the character's arc. Airwolf participates in the climax and plays an integral part in it, but it's not at all the centerpiece. That's a quality that would gradually diminish over the seasons, as raw action would supersede more honest and interesting character growth that would, early, play more parallel to Airwolf and her various missions. The pilot's action finale all but eliminates sound effects as Hawke tracks his target in Airwolf. Theme music captures a soaring, but at the same time, sentimental spirit and visuals do much of the talking. When Hawke engages his target prey, music cuts out and raw sound effects step in, again underscoring the scene's emotional resonance and the character's arc that comes full circle in the episode and helps better shape the backstory and driving forces for later episodes. Airwolf can rarely match the pilot's narrative prowess or its dramatic overtones and undercurrents, but the series does yield oftentimes enjoyable and occasionally heartfelt episodes throughout the run.

Even when Airwolf isn't at its core dramatic, character-based best, it can still offer plenty of cheesy era-specific fun. The series plays rather loose with its episodic nature, particularly early on, as character development often goes hand-in-hand with Airwolf's mission-of-the-week. But beyond a few running threads, particularly Hawke's quest to locate his missing brother, Airwolf toils through a number of one-off episodes that, throughout season one, capture a darker, more dramatically intense, international scope. Story lines tend to weave through easily identifiable parallels to the world as it was in the mid-1980s while later seasons largely abandoned a more purposeful and engaging approach to favor a lighter spin on the characters and the world in which they operate. Yet it was (and still is!) fun to watch Airwolf and her crew go about the business of saving the world, whether on a truly global stage or on more personal and localized missions that allowed the audience to ooh and aah at what are still some nifty high speed practical visuals. The chopper is sleek and smooth and the filmmakers certainly didn't shy away from capturing the intensity of its offensive capabilities or maneuverability in the air. Action scenes might become a little repetitive after a while, but there's just something special -- magical -- about the series' plentiful practical effects (at least in its first seasons) and the way Airwolf becomes an integral character not so much with its own story, but rather its own unique skill set that sets it apart but not so far as to remember that it's the people piloting her who are really the driving force behind it.

All of this revolves around the series' rather troubled production history -- its tone-changing act between seasons one and two and shift to new characters and a new television home in season four -- that never allowed the series to soar, at least well beyond the rock-solid foundation constructed for it in season one. Network tinkering wasn't a total loss. Middle seasons introduce a new, favorite character in Caitlin O'Shannessy (Jean Bruce Scott) and there are plenty of exciting, well designed and executed episodes, but the series never captures that same edgy draw that it developed in the first season. By season four, the entire program was all but unrecognizable as a new cast replaced the old. Series Creator Donald P. Bellisario, who had previously hit it big with Magnum, P.I. and would later hit it bigger with Quantum Leap, JAG, and particularly NCIS (that's quite the resumé!), was long since gone from the scene by series' end, and a great, high-flying concept never got very far off the ground, so to speak. But the show remains a favorite for audiences stuck in, or who remember fondly, the 1980s. "Iconic" may be too big a word to describe it -- frankly, Airwolf is dwarfed by most all of the bigger names to come out of network TV in the decade -- but it's at times a rock-solid, and at times very flawed, TV show that still holds up well enough not simply as a nostalgic trip but as legitimately entertaining television and a good example of potential unfulfilled.

Airwolf: The Complete Series Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Airwolf: The Complete Series maneuvers onto Blu-ray with an all-around passable 1080p transfer that does retain the series' native 4x3 aspect ratio, which would have been "full frame" back in the day but that, on today's wider panels, necessitates vertical "black bars" flanking the image on either side. These aren't exactly pristine releases, but for the most part they're more than watchable and even, oftentimes, enjoyable. Compression artifacts appear at times, with macroblocking particularly troublesome. Print wear isn't overwhelming, but various splotches and imperfections are frequent. Definition proves fair at best and lackluster at worst. The image takes on a severely flat, oftentimes smooth texturing that results in zero perceived depth and curtails any real opportunity for details to organically shine. While the material does benefit from the raw boost in resolution over standard, detailing never quite breaks free and increases in sizable, more than baseline appreciable ways. Raw details on clothes -- flight suits and other heavy material, for instance -- are tangibly more complex, but still rather crude and certainly failing to capture anything remotely resembling the level of fine complexity even more modest transfers produce. Faces aren't devoid of intimate detailing, but neither can the transfer dig deep enough to reveal much of anything worth noting. Background details, whether the rustic Stringfellow Hawke homestead interior, rocky and sandy desert terrain, control panels inside the helicopter, or other larger-scale or closely-observable objects, never soar. Colors are impressive on a baseline level. Some background greenery fails to pop, but up-front colors -- such as Dominic's shiny red ball cap -- offer some punch. Baseline earthy colors or darker attire prove adequately stable. Grain can spike into snowy excess in lower-light scenes and black levels frequently push far too pale.

Things unsurprisingly don't improve in any meteoric way over the course of the series. Season four sees a transition from a very clear and consistently so, but somewhat flat, appearance to a more diverse look that sees a blend of spiked grain here, smoothness there, and plentiful upscaled standard definition video shots that stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. Airwolf is at its best in the middle seasons where the image is rather smooth, but clarity is solid, definition stable, and colors adequately punchy. Overall, it's a serviceable picture, at best, that's worlds improved over whatever was broadcast back in the day, and that the image holds up, and looks rather crudely pleasant even on much larger screens than it was ever imagined to be seen back in the mid-80s, is alone probably, and rightly, enough to entice longtime, die-hard Airwolf fans. Hardcore videophiles will most certainly balk, but as a budget release from a budget-minded studio, this approaches best-case scenario. That the show is on Blu-ray at all is a minor miracle, and that it looks "good enough" is in its own way a nostalgic treat.

Airwolf: The Complete Series Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

For a TV show that's over thirty years old, it's not much of a surprise that Mill Creek's Blu-ray release of Airwolf: The Complete Series contains only a Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack across all four seasons. And not a surprise either is that it's a rather bland, straightforward, no-frills sort of listen that executes sound basics but never with any sort of dynamic range, expanded elegance, or rich clarity. Certainly it's a fair bit better than whatever a console television could muster up back in the day, but keep expectations in check. It's rather crude beyond the basics of dialogue and music, the former of which the track manages to push towards the center for an even, balanced point of entry into the listening area. Music is likewise pushed towards the center, though in this case the lack of breathing room is a net negative. Most every note is some form of muddled, albeit to varying degrees and often favoring the "better" end of the scale, but it's lacking purity to be sure and only capable of mustering enough basic definition to maintain general integrity. Sonic range is limited and the low end channel is of course absent. Action effects don't fare any better. Choppers rumbling through the skies and explosions that are result of missile fire or other bits of mayhem never extend any depth or weight. Again, the track simply reproduces a basic sonic shape without any capability to refine. All that said, the track can't be labeled as much of a disappointment. Considering the show's obvious budget-natured Blu-ray release, the studio wasn't going remix for a 5.1 track à la Battlestar Galactica, a show a few years older than Airwolf. There's plenty of ways Airwolf's track could shine, but it never does. If nothing else, think of it as part of the nostalgia.

Airwolf: The Complete Series Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Unlike That '70s Show, Mill Creek's last big complete TV series Blu-ray release, Airwolf: The Complete Series contains no supplemental content. No commentaries, no bonus discs, no featurettes, nothing. The four seasons come housed in four Blu-ray cases that are a little thicker than average. They're all tucked in a basic thick cardboard sleeve. Beyond season one, which is comprised of only two discs, subsequent seasons are spread across four. Discs are stacked one atop another on either side of the case.

Airwolf: The Complete Series Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Airwolf is fun retro TV, imperfect as it may be. The show finds a pretty good rhythm through its first season but declines steadily thereafter, though certainly seasons two and three deliver enough pure action and excitement, and some character development, to maintain interest. Season four is more a curiosity than anything else, but still essential to the Airwolf story. It's good to have it on Blu-ray. Though Mill Creek's release of Airwolf: The Complete Series could stand a little more TLC, and certainly some supplements, it's worth a buy for the nostalgic trip. Fans of 80s TV should unflinchingly support this release, flaws and all. Hopefully it'll begin a trend of seeing some of the favorite 80s TV shows -- Knight Rider, The A-Team, Miami Vice, Magnum, P.I., The Dukes of Hazzard, MacGyver -- come to Blu-ray.