Anyone watch this show? These people are amazingly stupid, but tremendously amusing. I have to give the cops credit, I’ve seen them rush to pull a guy out of a burning car when he had been shooting at them seconds earlier. Me? I’d break out marshmellows and a stuck. Rarely do you see people die, but there were these two kids T-boned by a semi at 90 MPH, no way they survived. Why were they running? Because they stole a lawn mower. The one I just saw takes the cake, however. Cops pull a guy over, then ask him for permission to search his car.
Cop" Do you give us consent to search your vehicle? If you say no, you will be free to go on your way"
Guy “OK,” and signs the form.
The cops ask the guy to sit in the backseat of their car while they search, and immediately find several pounds of pot in the trunk. Meanwhile, you can hear the guy saying “Oh my God! This is horrible, why is this happening to me? Oh God, oh God!”
My biggest beef with this show and shows like it is the repetition of material. I’ve seen the motocycle guy smash into the back of the bus, like, 6 times already.
Nevertheless, I keep watching it.
There are a few quirks, though. I’m curious about the helicopter footage narration, ostensibly from a traffic reporter. It’s the same voice every time! Is this particular guy just a typical L.A. traffic reporter, or does his voice just get dubbed into a wide variety of clips where the original audio is unclear or absent?
That guy who smashed a corvette into the back of an 18-wheeler inadvertantly provided a stunning testament to American safety engineering. The car completely disintegrated, but he was just woozy.
And, of course, we have the smug narrator offering his pithy afterthoughts. “This crook though he could get away in a stolen vegetable truck, but now he’ll have plenty of time to toss salads, in jail!”
I love these shows. Nothing is more entertaining than human misery and desperation writ on the nation’s highways. I have, however, become jaded. Watching a fast-moving car strike a tractor-trailer rig at ninety miles per hour with a cluster of police cars in hot pursuit is no longer enough. I want to see some blood on the pavement, damn it, and some good shoot-outs while you’re at it.
Oh my God, did they actually say that? In case some people don’t know, ‘tossing salad’ is a slang term for a particularly disgusting sexual act performed in prison.
Christ, I love that show. The amazing car crashes and shoot outs are fun, but the best ones are when they pull over some guy who’s just too stupid to live. Saw one where they pulled over a guy for a busted tail light. The cop pointed it out, gave him a fix it ticket, and said he could go on his way, and the moron stands there chatting for five minutes, getting progressivly more incoherent. Finally the cop searches the car and finds something like five metric tonnes of crystal meth. (that was my estimate, at least. Might have been a smidge less) If the moron had just gotten in his car and driven away, well, he wouldn’t be tossing salads today.
Another good one: Highway patrol pulls over a speeder. As the cop is leaning in the window to talk to the driver, some drunk in an SUV comes so close to hitting the cop that he knocks his pistol off of his belt. :eek:
Plus, they have those heavily armored bank robbers holding off 2/3rds of the LAPD while they re-enact the movie Heat. My mom, the bank VP, loves that one, especially when they run up and shoot him in the head.
What I’ve noticed about these types of shows (ESPECIALLY COPS) is that most of the dudes that get arrested are ALL shirtless…that cracks me up so much…every COPS episode (I know we’re talking about WWPV), even on the WWPV, there is at least one dude shirtless complaining “ofica, I din’ do anythin’!!” Gets me everytime:D
I love that bank robbery one! The cops finally went to a gun store and got Armalites. I saw one on car chases and accidents, and this cop pulls a woman over for speeding, then asks her to stand on the shoulder so they don’t get stuck by a car. They move, but she moves back. He asks her again to move back, and they do. Almost on cue, a van smashes into her car and annihilates it. It was sort of cosmic.
Did you see the one where the cop actually got hit by a car? It was unbelievable; the cop was talking to the driver of the car he’d pulled over and walked up to the guy’s driver side door for some reason and WHAM! He was hit by a car doing 40, 50 miles an hour. The guy he’d pulled over dragged him behind the car and covered him up and called for help on the police radio, and damned if the cop didn’t make it. I suspect they tore up his ticket.
The car that hit the cop fled the scene. Really bright thing to do, yessirree, hit a cop and run away. Gosh, ya think they caught them?
Actually, if this is the same one that I’m thinking about, the guy was thrown clear of the wreck. That only amazed me more. But yeah, the Corvette was torn to shreds. I also love the shows and watch any and all of them every chance I get. If you get the show “Maximum Exposure” and you like this type of show, I highly recommend you watch it. Its not all cop stuff. Its mostly showing home videos of people doing truely stupid things. The website has a few videos of each weeks show. http://www.maximumexp.com/
The comentary during the shows is the best.
dead0man…pimping maxX
I’ve had enough of the Police Videos/Dangrous Pursuites/etc. that TLC runs. There’s so much material for WWPV that the series is now seen outside the Fx channel; for example, it’s carried in the DC area on Saturdays and Sundays on WDCA 20.
BTW: another Videos series in the Maximum Exposure vein is Real TV.
I love these shows too, but I like them less when they fake a lot of stuff just to make it look and sound better.
That same helicopter guy who does the voice over for a lot of the chases? Faked most of the time. I read that he’s a real helicopter reporter in California who did some of the early ones, and then people liked his delivery and got used to his voice so the tv show just hired him to fake the voice over for a lot of the chases. Think about it: How does he cover chases in LA and Chicago and Miami on a regular basis? He’s everywhere.
Also, they add a LOT of sound effects to sweeten the chase footage. My favorites are the helicopter shots where you can miraculously hear the squeal of tires on pavement, horns blowing and such. From way up in the air, with all the helicopter noise.
Even the footage from inside the police cars is sweetened with sound effects. After all, it’s just a normal video camera mounted on the dash, with the officer miked for sound sometimes.
Most notably, the Fox show presented some dramatic footage from a sheriff’s office in Georgia as the real thing, when it was all staged for the camera. It was pretty apparent if you paid attention, because the camera was right in the middle of the action and there was more than one camera angle. They got called on that one and subsequent repeats discreetly labeled the footage as “police training” tape.
I love it when they show skanky, drunk chicks trying to pass a sobriety test. They flirt with the cops, offer sexual favors, etc. while trying to get out of the situation. Then when the cops don’t fall for it, they get all pissed off and angry, and start cussing out the cops! LOL! I love that!
And when a trashy perp is being taken out of his home, they always ask the same thing: “Can I get my cigarettes?”
This amuses me to no end. You’re being arrested, for God’s sake, and you’ve got some mighty serious crap to worry about at the moment. But what’s on your mind? Gotta have some smokes.
This is especially true on “Cops.” Now it’s like a game to watch for it whenever some drunk is being hauled away.
Me: “Okay, he’s in cuffs, he’s being dragged away. Wait for it… Wait for it…”
Perp: “Can I get my cigarettes?”
Me: “Yes!”
The MaxEx list is the best! I liked the one with the series of (shirtless) drunk people trying to pass the roadside sobriety tests. The guy who picked up the orange traffic cone and shouted through it at the cop was a real gem. I recently had some days off work and was absolutely addicted to WWPV, Real TV, and Cops. The riot scenes scare me, though.
I know people are stupid, you don’t have to show me over and over again.
I don’t want to see scary car chases that have me sweating whenever I get on the highway.
I don’t want to see people start wailing on a cop that only pulled them over for some trivial matter.
I don’t want to watch these dumb &%^&**%$ who get chased out of the damn store they were trying to rob by a 60 year-old clerk who actually doesn’t give a damn about the place.
And most especially, I really don’t want to see that annoying, grey-haired, putty-faced whining cop that hosts the worthless show. I hate that guy with a passion.
The only way I might enjoy these brainless misadventures of the criminally inept is if it was that jackass in alone in the middle of a jail break getting his cleche-riddled cranium smashed in with a prison-issued bottle of Perrier.
You’re probably hearing Bob Tur, who is (or maybe used to be) a traffic reporter for KCBS in Los Angeles. He’s the one who started marketing this whole police-chase-as-entertainment madness, selling his “Dangerous Pursuits” videos long before the first FOX special appeared.
Dunno if he still works in L.A. (I never watch KCBS anymore), but apparently he’s got a new gig in dubbing his voice over police chase footage from Austin to Amsterdam.
Of course not, you rube. But in every episode John Bunnell and/or Paul Stojanovich (I can’t remember who’s who, like the early days of Siskel and Ebert) will offer up a trenchant insight, usually involving some lame-ass pun based on the perp’s choice of vehicle/clothing etc.
“He thought he could outrun the law in a stolen ice-cream truck, but now he’ll have time to cool his heels… in jail!”
“He thought he could outrun police in his stolen ambulance, but now he needs an ambulance to take him… to jail!”
“He thought stealing a Toys ‘R’ Us truck would be fun, but now he’ll be everyone’s plaything… in jail!”
(Okay, I made up that last one.)
The British versions seem a lot more sedate. They don’t often end with someone going to jail but usually just losing license points and paying a fine. They focus more on driver stupidity rather than driver lunacy.
