Hawaii Five-0
The Third Season
Starring Jack Lord, Cam Fong, Zulu
Paramount Home Entertainment
Available Jan. 22, 2008

When you hear an urban youth refer to the cops as “Five-0,” when you hear the Hawaii Five-0 theme song by The Ventures used in movies from Leroy & Stitch to Madagascar to Mr. Bean’s Holiday, and when Hawaii Five-0 is referenced several times in the Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland, you know the show has reached pop-icon status.

Appearing on CBS from 1968 to 1980, Hawaii Five-0 was the longest running crime show on network TV, until Law & Order broke its record in 2003. Now, CBS and Paramount is releasing the series on DVD, with the first two seasons already available; and now, all 24 episodes of the third season are available in a six-disc set.

Hawaii Five-0 centered on the adventures of the fictional Hawaii state police agency that seemed to have only about four employees at any given time, yet was able to stamp all the crime the popped up in the Aloha State. Five-0 was lead by Steve McGarrett (played by Jack Lord), who approached the role with steely seriousness. If Mr. Spock had been a American cop in Hawaii, he would have been Steve McGarrett.

Assisting McGarrett was his no-nonsense second-in-command Danny Williams — none of these guys were ever given an official police rank like “Captain” or “Lieutenant — and two Hawaii native cops Chin Ho Kelly (played by actor Cam Fong) and Kono Kalakaua (played by actor Zulu).

In the third season (1970-71), the Five-0 unit investigated, solved, and thwarted a number of crimes including a bank robbery, a murder, an international counterfeiting plot, a jewel heist, a kidnapping, and even the theft of a priceless violin.

For the fan of modern police dramas, some of this will seem a bit dated. McGarrett and his team are constantly walking around crime scenes, touching evidence without gloves, determining the paths of bullets with visual dead-reckoning instead of forensic science, and rushing to crime scenes all over the island in those giant yacht-sized cars that every TV cop drove from about 1958 to 1985.

Other viewers may be amused by McGarrett’s seemingly iron haircut (no matter how windy it is, McGarett’s hair just never blows around), his wardrobe of dark suits (when it’s 80 degrees in Honolulu, you’re going to want to arrive at work in a navy-blue suit), and his seeming inability to sweat (even the guest-stars look a little moist from the Hawaiian heat in some scenes, but Jack Lord refuses to perspire).

But most of the episodes hold up pretty well for a modern audience.

Some of the best season three episodes include:

* “And A Time To Die” and the two-part “F.O.B. Honolulu” episodes. All of these episodes feature Wo Fat (played by actor Khigh Dheigh), a Chinese Communist agent who was McGarrett’s reoccurring arch-nemesis in the series. Wo Fat was probably the best sinister oriental mastermind since Fu-Manchu and was patterned after James Bond’s adversary Dr. No. All the Wo-Fat episodes were like small self-contained spy stories with WoFat and McGarrett playing elaborate “cat-and-mouse” games. The Wo Fat episodes are among the best in this (or any other) Five-0 collection.

* Over Fifty? “Steal” marked the first appearance of Hume Cronyn as Lewis Avery Filer, a clever robber you really kind of hope doesn’t get caught. This episode was the first appearance of Filer, who proved popular enough to confound McGarrett and crew in subsequent seasons. It’s interesting to note that Filer turns to crime when he loses his job and can’t find another one because he is over 50. This may be the first time “ageism” was discussed as discrimination on a network TV show.

* “Trouble In Mind” features guest-star Nancy Wilson as a heroin-addicted singer very much like Billie Holiday. Drug addiction was a relatively new topic for 1970’s TV, and it’s interesting to see it addressed with some compassion.

* “Time And Memories” shows us a little about McGarett when he was a Naval officer and before he became a super-cop and “Beautiful Screamer” shows us a little of Danny “Dano” William’s personal life and the death of his girlfriend. These guys spent so much time solving crimes and showing no emotion and exhibiting the kind of stoic camaraderie that viewers probably thought they had no personal life. These episodes helped humanize the characters.

* “The Ransom” spotlights the Kono character who, in most episodes, did little more than nod and follow orders. McGarrett and the others try to get to Kono before his kidnappers torture him to death.

Hawaii Five-0 was a pretty standard police show. However, its influence is still felt in pop-culture and even after its last broadcast, many of the same locations and even some direct references were used in Magnum P.I., another popular Hawaii cop show.

If you like your cops raw, emotionless, incorruptible, and violent, or if you just want to visit a time when people believed the criminal justice system worked really well, you will most definitely enjoy Hawaii Five-0.