Riptide -George mention

19 December 2010

Always Ready for Our Close-up: Redondo Beach keeps popping up in movies and TV shows.

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Our fair city was once the setting of an NBC TV show: Riptide, which ran from 1983 to 1986. Check out the show's intro on YouTube, and you'll see helicopters, speedboats, babes in bikinis, moustachio'd hunks, and a friendly robot—all against the backdrop of the King Harbor Marina.

Perry King, Joe Penny and Thom Bray starred as buddies and Viet Nam War vets who together owned the Riptide Detective Agency. Each week they solved crimes, kissed the babe du jour, and in general enjoyed an exciting beachfront lifestyle. The popular show followed The A-Team on Tuesday nights until—in its last year—Riptide was put up against Moonlighting, a hit series with Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis.

Riptide had some star power of its own—Anne Francis, Cesar Romero, Geena Davis and George Clooney were all guests—but it lost the ratings war. Still, three seasons is a very respectable showing in the cut-throat world of prime-time TV. The original Star Trek only lasted three seasons, after all, but it birthed a veritable industry.

And speaking of Star Trek, did you know that at least one episode had scenes shot in Redondo Beach? In "Operation Annihilate" Spock battled a jelly-like blob that dropped that onto his back from the ceiling. The site of the attack was none other than Space Park, a 110-acre site developed by TRW in 1960. Since neither TRW nor the current tenants, Northrop Grumann, welcome tourists to the complex, this TV-show-glimpse may the only chance some of us have to see Space Park.

More recently, Redondo has popped up on 90210, its shoots disrupting traffic in Riviera Village and causing eye-rolls from surfers who scoff at the show's depiction of it. RB also stood in for the OC—specifically, Laguna Beach—in several episodes of The OC. Filming took place along the Esplanade and on the beach itself. Other TV appearance include the Star Trek Enterprise in which our AES power plant played planet Rigel X. The plant also appeared in 24 and a Britney Spears video.

As for movies, here's a filmography of Redondo Beach:

■Big chunks of Bruce Willis' Live Free or Die Hard and Transformers were shot at the AES power plant.
■The Hot Chick with Rob Schneider contains a scene filmed at Redondo Union High School's stadium.
■Dive & Surf makes a drive-by appearance in Point Break (along with the intersection of Beryl and Catalina).
■Much of 1990's Men at Work—starring Martin Sheen's sons as garbage collectors—was filmed here.
■Big Momma's House 2 and an episode of Dexter used the pier as a backdrop.
■The Black Pearl was anchored in our stretch of ocean for scenes from Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End