This is something we hear almost daily today about the effects of drone warfare. 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. Murphy hijacks Blue Thunder and arranges to have his girlfriend Kate (Candy Clark) retrieve the tape and deliver it to the local news station, using the helicopter to thwart her pursuers. Murphy suspects the involvement of his old wartime nemesis, former United States Army Colonel F.E. 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. [3] A spin-off television series, also called Blue Thunder, ran for 11 episodes in 1984.[4]. It was released in East Germany and South Korea in 1984. Overall, in the US, it took in $42,313,354 for its 66 days of release. Blue Thunder is a special federal air unit based in Los Angeles. We didn’t hurt anyone, thank God. Just smoke and mirrors; all plastic and paper; fully non-functional. “We knocked off Daniel Stern for a very good reason,” remembers Badham. It's overkill especially on city streets. The film stars Roy Scheider as Frank Murphy – a Vietnam War veteran who now pilots helicopters for the LAPD – but its advertising played up the fact that the “star” of the movie was this state-of-the-art and, yes, “badass” helicopter named Blue Thunder that could snuff out villains with precision accuracy and hover undetected with features such as “whisper mode.”.

The guys befriend parachutist Gretchen Terrell during an air show. Blue Thunder just came out 33 years too early. Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Written by Dan O’Bannon, who wrote Alien and co-wrote 1990’s Total Recall, the dirty little secret about Blue Thunder is that the movie hates Blue Thunder. A spin-off television series, also called Blue Thunder, ran for 11 episodes in 1984. And we kept it because it was so well done and so wonderfully fun that we said, ‘Oh, we have to hang on to this.’ ”). Watch out, George, the Jedi have competition."[14]. 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. [6], Malcolm McDowell, who portrayed antagonist F. E. Cochrane, was intensely afraid of flying, and not even his then-wife Mary Steenburgen could persuade him to overcome his phobia.

It was a full-size model. ‘Oh, yeah, let’s do it!’ It was great! (1984). (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. McDowell's grimaces and discomfort can be seen during the climactic battle between Murphy and Cochrane in the film.

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[10], Blue Thunder received positive reviews, being given a 77% positive rating at the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes based on 22 reviews. Never has there ever been so many bad guys with air support. An advanced prototype police helicopter and their ground support crew battle crime. Scary stuff… stuff that we all just kind of assume is happening now. The operation is then suspended by the mayor. And not even real spying, but, let’s say, spying on personal, intimate, information because, well, it’s there – something Edward Snowden has often repeated is happening. ", "Blue Thunder: The Helicopter, Movie Information. [11] Variety called it "a ripsnorting live-action cartoon, utterly implausible but no less enjoyable for that". Two weeks after its premiere, CBS would air its own “badass” helicopter series, Airwolf. It is a military-style combat aircraft intended for police use in surveillance and against possible large-scale civic disobedience during the then-upcoming 1984 Olympic games.

Murphy then destroys Blue Thunder by landing it in front of an approaching freight train. Its UK release was August 25, 1983. 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. Looking for some great streaming picks? The cases of a female private detective partnered with a former thief who assumes the role of a fictitious detective in the business. In Blue Thunder, there’s a scene in which Murphy and his co-pilot, Richard Lymangood (a baby-faced Daniel Stern), hover above a suburban Los Angeles home, undetected, using an advanced camera and listening device to “monitor” a nude woman doing yoga. “Now that scene was actually completely shot by Marty Brest. The helicopters used for Blue Thunder were French built Aérospatiale SA-341G Gazelles modified with bolt-on parts and Apache-style canopies. As Scheider’s Murphy walks away, Blue Thunder is hit by a train and blown up into a million pieces. Joining him in the cockpit is computer tech observer Clinton 'JAFO' Wonderlove (Dana Carvey). Lt. Frank Chaney of the LAPD is a maverick cop with unorthodox methods who is assigned to the Blue Thunder Team, which uses a very advanced gadget-filled helicopter in its fight against crime.

", 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. It was quite possibly even more ahead of its time than WarGames, yet despite doing serviceable business at the box office (it would finish 17th for the year), it’s never had the lasting cultural significance it deserved. “John Landis wanted this all in the frame, which meant bringing the helicopter down lower and lower and lower.” He continues, “This was all because Landis insisted upon this stuff.” Adding, “He’s got quite a temper and he’s very insistent on things.”, After the Twilight Zone incident, Badham remembers calling Jim Gavin.