Leaderboard

No you’re right. The domino bar and the one later on where they meet Desmond are two unknown locations and need to be added to the search list. I‘ll look into it later to see if I can come up with something.

"I hate this assignment!"

And I´m more a big fan of location finding, not searching or in other words: "I want to roast the turkey and not to know how it grew up" (Trudy) / "Gun shooting, not gun running" (Tubbs)

EXACT APARTMENT FOUND: DALE MENTON´S (AND JOE DAN´S PLACE IN INDIAN WARS, allegedly in Boca) 520 Brickell Key Drive, Brickell One Building, Apartment 1207 @Dadrian found this matching between both episodes some time ago,, so the location is not new, but the apartment is. I was never aware that we see the apartment number in this episode to identify the exact apartment (I haven´t seen Golden Triangle for quite some time). The number is clearly visible and on the side wall, not on the door itself. Funny enough, this exact apartment is on the market, https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/520-Brickell-Key-Dr-Apt-A1207_Miami_FL_33131_M69228-62445#photo0 but "completely remodeled" (I don´t get why they are proud of that, because it looks like a boring garden variety apartment now and was so cool back in 1984 and 1987). Such a shame that this landmark is gone, but we know now exactly where it was!

UNKNOWN LOCATIONS: DOMINO/DIVE BAR, MEETING WITH MAXWELL To make it short: it will be nearly impossible to find this. No clues and this area has changed a lot since then. The dive bar´s gotta be the filthiest and visually most disgusting place MV ever filmed in (just compare this with the exclusive looks of the drug den in Smuggler´s blues for instance).. This place looks so fuXXed up in 1984 that I doubt it survived the next year. Rick Bravo remembers that it was the backroom of a shop on Washington Ave. The first may be right (there is an indication on the wall that it was a mechanic´s place), but I doubt that it was on Washington Ave. The rear exit has a backyard with lots of green vegetation/small wood behind. I see no such possibility on Washington on historic aerials. All houses on Washington are back to back with other houses there. On the front we get a glimpse through the bathroom window and we see a wall with vegetation, assuming that there will be another main building before the street. Both hints sum up to an impossible layout on Washington at least anywhere near 1435 where the other scenes before and after were filmed. The meeting with Maxwell looks like a kind of market or street festival, but no clues/wide angle shots to spot anything specific. Both locations are incredibly boring and colorwise dull like many other scenes in the first episodes by old veteran directors. Honestly, I don´t dig this episode visually at all. P.S. these locations and this whole episode are proof that the "no brown" rule of Michael Mann was either a fairy tale or was not enforced at all. Brown rusty vans and brown interior all over.

We do what we’re told...

You've answered correctly! Like I knew you would!

Hackman. “Forgive Us Our Debts”.

Thanks I will check but Rick was more often wrong than right with his memory of locations .... eg the Disco „Heaven“ in Calderones Return that was in fact Nepenthe in Lauderdale...

Great episode here! This is one I’ve rewatched countless times. I love the plot, the guest actors/actresses, the music, etc. Two amazing Depeche Mode songs! The other songs used are also very good! I really like the scene of Crockett driving at night, but wish they would have added new shots of him inside the car for proper continuity. Kelly Lynch and Penelope Ann Miller are both very beautiful and great in their roles. How can you tell someone’s eyes are dead? If you saw my eyes you’d probably think I was dead. I really have to applaud Paul Guilfoyle’s performance in this episode. He was just so creepy and intriguing. He seemed kind of flirty with Crockett in a non-sexual way, but I think he just loved to tease him because he knew he couldn’t be caught. Some people said they don’t Iike this episode because it’s creepy. Well, I love creepy stuff! Creepiness in TV, film, music, and art are all very appealing and enjoyable to me! I am a big horror and thriller fan! This would definitely make my Vice Top Ten list!

AKA “The Ghost of the Daytona”

Sorry about that. I thought it was a Ferrari 308 GTS.

The outdoor filming was certainly done there - most probably in this left "cage" surrounded by the unique railings (with the upper part replaced by grilles). The still shows that when C&T drag Tucker out of the room there is a real modern kitchen with a black/white floor behind them that does not look bad. No way to match it exactly with the episode interiors as the kitchen is not visible in the drug den scenes, BUT: the color in the kitchen wall above (lavender) matches the color in the drug den on the upper left when C&T drag Tucker away to the other room! It looks like a very modern apartment that looks a bit odd in this overall rundown place as lower Ocean Drive certainly was in general in 1984. I don´t see the unique railings elsewhere on the inside of that building, but it certainly could have been removed since then. We all know that such Art deco railings are unique and are never used twice. The apartment number where they filmed had a "11 V" on the door whatever the "V" means (veranda? but why have it on the door number?). It is at a corner as the two windows seen indicate (if they are real windows). The layout fits too. C&T drag Tucker out to the left in another room (kitchen?). Shape and size of windows would approximately fit with that building we see outside. The second window on the frontal corner apartment, adjacent to the railings, would have been the kitchen then we see. So far, so good with continuity and layout. Behind Crockett&Tubbs we see trash cans, thus this could have been indeed the veranda next to the garbage cans of the whole complex. The only detail that does not fit: the apartment entrance is vis as vis the front side (street side) window as we see in the episode without editing That does not match here as the apartment entrances are all from inside the inner yard that would mean entering the apartment from the right side (seen from inside). This is only explainable if they used another corner apartment on the other side of the yard for interior filming. There are several interior apartment pics on the net, but not from apartment 11. Apartment 12 is close, but also shows no clear matches 36 years after and looks very ordinary. https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/260-Ocean-Dr-Apt-12_Miami-Beach_FL_33139_M67298-09086#photo10 Slight chance that the interior was filmed elsewhere as indicated above with the location of the entrance door. But overall clues indicate to 99% that´s it. Congrats again to @daytona365 for spotting it out! P.S. Trivia: I came across this building when I searched for Knox´ apartment in "Death and the lady" but ruled it out quickly.

We discussed this in an old thread. It’s a bouquet of birds. Not just one “F-you” but a party of eight!

I always found that hilarious, as well as Switek's laughter. Sonny could've called him an "Alpha-Hotel" like he did the IA guys.

I feel your pains as I too miss dressing up and actually going places without a mask. I loved dressing up in my best Tubbs fashion for Sunday church and getting compliments. Really a bad year for us Vice fashion aficionados.

So I always thought that was his polite, for the tv show, way of saying F-you to the offer to drive the bug van.

It is! I went inside in 2003 and it still looked EXACTLY like Killshot!

Maybe he’d given up cigarettes AND hot dogs by then...

That sounds like a very good, if somewhat complicated, way to avoid generational loss. The real variable using this method isn’t the copying though, but rather the condition of the original VHS tape, and I mean the physical magnetic tape inside. The parts of this plastic tape begin to breakdown over time. How old are the tapes is a big variable. The tape includes the plastic tape itself, the magnetic oxide holding the signal, and the adhesive that bind that to the tape. If stored improperly or played frequently the degradation happens quite quickly. Simple dust damages the magnetic oxide. Remember also, to simply watch the video, there has to be physical contact between the tape and the head reading it, like a stylus in a record groove. That’s the nature of any analog system as opposed to a digital system that is optically read. Every time it is played it is degraded slightly as well. Essentially what you would be getting using this method is an almost perfect copy of a degraded tape. Don’t take this as overly negative. I’m not discouraging anyone from doing this. The degradation will only continue if not preserved in some way. The vast majority of films from the silent era are lost, many simply turned to cellulose dust in the film canisters if the nitrate didn’t catch fire first! Just understand that a copy is only as good as the source material.

This been a bummer of a summer so far. I haven't rocked a MV look yet this year. I used to have a lot of opportunities, but with limiting my exposure to risk, I haven't been many places. I was going to try a season 2 look while I was at the lake this past weekend but it was a heat index of 104. I kept thinking no matter how hot it gets, sooner or later there is a cool breeze coming in. Didn't happen.

Even funnier how the race groupie is waiting on a juicy hot dog!

Someone earlier in the thread said when you transfer VHS there's a generational loss in quality. I just wanna point out that you can get a perfect lossless transfer if you know how to rip VHS straight to digital on your computer. It's very complicated but it works. You need a pro-grade VCR (which are rare and expensive now), something called a Time-Base--Corrector (about $200), and a bare-bones PC that stills runs windows XP (for whatever reason, XP does a better job than Windows 7 and 10). You need it to be bare bones so that the PC is only running the programs you're using, and nothing else, so as to avoid frame drops. You can mess around with the color, brightness, contrast, etc.. with the time base corrector before you rip. As long as you don't have any issues with dropped frames (which means you both lose frames from the recording, and it causes audio-sync issues). Then you can always edit those later with your lossless rips (usually .AVI format). There's a website called "The digitalfaq.com" where they have tons of tutorials that show you how to do this yourself. Lists of the best pro-grade VCRs (and where to find them), and they offer services to do it for you (about $20-$40 per hour of footage, depending on if you want the footage cleaned up). Great for people with tons of old home movies on VHS just sitting around in a closet somewhere. I plan on doing it myself someday, but for now, I'm ok with my (unfortunate) dvd copies with 1 generation of loss. My relatives were OK with the copies I made them as well, lol.

Thanks Pals, had a good day.

Yes, ivoryjones is very informed & well versed on the topic of the original “MV colors” and/or the changes & alterations...especially with the syndicated reruns. Awesome logo pics all together...I’ve seen them before separated out but it’s kinda cool to see them beside each other! The logo colors were, for whatever reasons, changed in the syndicated reruns for I believe Seasons 3-5...they were made this very un-MV-like dark green & purple. It’s awesome seeing the original & “real” logos & colors! Below is the “fake” colored logo used in the reruns...& subsequently the DVD & Blu-ray sets:

Ok so putting aside the issue of incorrect colors, I wanted to do a compare and contrast of all the different title shots. I chose nine of the most representative images from each season (thanks for your hard work, ivoryjones!) and they appear in chronological order, from top left to bottom right. Also I did my best to control for brightness/saturation between the shots (the "in stereo" logo really helped) and any time I had to interpret/take some artistic license I decided to err on the side of too much saturation (especially the blues) rather than too little since that seems to be one of the main complaints of the DVD/streaming releases. Feel free to take it or leave it, pal Season 1 titles... you can see the addition of the glow for Calderone's Return Season 2... gotta love those blues Seasons 3 through 5, which each row representing one season. There simply isn't enough variation in the colors to do each of these seasons separately It's really remarkable how they were tweaking these for damn near every episode, even if it was just the slightest brightening or darkening. That's some real attention to detail that makes the decision to forgo these in the later releases all the more baffling. And if nothing else I hope these make for some damn sexy eye candy!

VHS is actually a less stable medium than film. It decays in several ways over time, one of which is simply watching it. The magnetic tape itself also degrades. I’ve read 10% in 10 years. Transfers, as you mentioned, are the worst. Generational loss is huge! Also, most people don’t have the ability to store VHS tapes perfectly. VHS tapes at home are subject to dust and can also start to degrade as a result of tape-eating bacteria and deterioration from the elements such as heat and moisture. You probably have no way of knowing, but the quality of the DVD copy you have is also very dependent on how often the original VHS tape was played. If it was recorded then put away and stored properly, a BIG if, then you may have a reasonable copy. I’m sorry to say though, that it’s not likely as close as you think.

The reruns, even the early ones, would likely not have used the same film to video transfers as the network used for the original run. I worked in production for a few years in the 90’s and learned a lot. This is actually postproduction we’re talking about, really distribution if we’re being technical, but the color decisions happen in postproduction. The way it was originally done was this: (sorry if this is redundant to you) The show was shot on 35mm Panaflex film. The negative is processed and a working print is used to edit the episode or the editing decisions can be made with a videotape transfer. This varies from TV to motion pictures. Once the editing decisions are done, the original negative is cut and printed. That is the film print that will be transferred to video tapes and sent to all the network affiliates to show in the original run. When a show is syndicated and sold to different stations, they have to go back and make a lot more videotape copies of the original print to send out everywhere, even globally. Just transferring the original print to videotape involved decisions about color that could alter it. That print could have degraded a bit even then. There’s a story about Steven Spielberg saying that in under five years the blues of the ocean in Jaws were fading and the blood in Robert Shaw’s mouth was becoming more bright red.

I’m no expert on this topic but I have a friend who in the 90’s used to work in film processing for Deluxe film lab in Hollywood, the 100+ year old company. I learned a lot from him. Of course, now everything is digital. My understanding is that 35mm film like the ubiquitous Panaflex used for Miami Vice and most dramatic television for decades, has real issues with color degradation over time. If the negative is not stored absolutely properly, it can start to degrade in as little as five years! Also, the different colors degrade at different rates. Add to that the transfer to video, which is what we were watching in the 80’s, and there is an immense amount of variability in color possibilities. Even going back to the original negative for Blu-ray isn’t the “original” color because the negative has degraded and will have to be color corrected. All these steps, from the original film development to the video transfer to modern color correction involve decisions by individuals along the way. They all affect the colors. If you take it to its logical end, our TV choice and even our own vision affect the colors we perceive. Bottom line, I think it’s hard define precisely what the original colors were for any film. We definitely notice the changes over time, but what were the original colors...???

Let me just say that I pulled those latest shots from that 1986 video on Jan Hammer specifically because the rest of the video is in high quality with good colors/contrast/black point and no apparent generational loss... if anything it looks like it could be from an original master tape and not a VHS copy. So I'm taking it at face value and assuming the Miami Vice clips show the colors in original HQ condition, and that's why I decided to do the compare & contrast EDIT: for instance, this is from the beginning of the video. Every color speaks clearly with no VHS smearing or wash-out... excellent quality color for 1986

--bump-- I'm watching through this series again and here I am again wandering aimlessly through this thread trying to interpret the colors I see on Hulu as they were originally intended. Once again I am amazed and baffled by the lack of color in the streaming versions and the variations to the title colors. Anywho, I wandered over onto the official Jan Hammer youtube page and he's got a ton of great videos, interviews with him in the mid-'80s and showing a ton of footage from the show. For the most part they're good quality and some of the clips clearly show the much more vivid colors that has been talked about ad naseum here. I pulled some screenshots from this video, which is worth watching It's from right after Jan won his two Grammys so it's probably from around March '86, in which case this title sequence (glow and then no glow) is from somewhere in the first two seasons Then here's some clips from the official Miami Vice Jan Hammer music video, showing the stupid sh*tty streaming/HD/DVD colors... And as they appeared in the Youtube video Once again, stupid sh*tty streaming/HD/DVD colors... circa 1986 original So once again I'm left to wonder what in the actual f*ck happened to the gorgeous colors of this show.

I rate this episode at least an 8/10.It isn't the best in the series, but it certainly isn't the worst either. The secondary plot of Sonny's Ferrari being taken is what really makes this episode for me, classic stuff. And features Eartha Kitt as a guest star, enough said.

“You wanna be dead? Bang, you’re dead.”

Not as bad as I remembered, but still pretty forgettable. The first 15-20 minutes were entertaining, but then I just kinda lose interest. Good Hammer music. I don't think Saundra's acting is as bad as some have said, but it's still odd that the start and end of season3 were episodes carried by her. Had this episode been somewhere else throughout the season it wouldn't get near as much flak. I think "Down For the Count" would have been a dramatic finale, with it then picking up in Season 4. However, I do like the idea from above about "Forgive Us Our Debts" being the finale, setting up Hackman's return. Also....did Crockett and Tubbs really fly all the way to New York and back to Miami for a day?? Quite a stakeout.

Day 3 of the conference... INC blazer from Macy's. Tasso Elba pants. Clark's shoes. T-shirt from Kohl's. I could have sworn that I took pictures on Days 2 and 4 but I can't find them. (Then, again I was hanging around a lot with my buds Jack Daniels and Jim Beam and you know how that goes... ) Day 2 was a gray blazer, white pants, and light green Henley with the white Lugz shoes. Day 4 was blue blazer, tan pants, and purple Henley. (On Day 4, I went untucked and didn't wear the suspenders because I ate too much food. I gained ten pounds .) I got three Vice-related comments, only one negative: 1. A guy shouted "Tubbs!" with a thumbs up. I shouted back, "He's cool, but no... Crockett!" "That's right!" he shouted. 2. A woman said, "I see what you're doing there. Miami Vice, right?" "Yes," I said. "Most guys couldn't pull that off, but somehow you get away with it." "Thanks!" 3. A guy at the Tiki bar looked me up and down, rolled his eyes, said "Don Johnson" in a mocking tone, and walked away shaking his head and snickering with his friends. I didn't let it bother me because he was dressed like he had just crawled out of the dumpster where he lives.

Also, the whole bit when Izzy finishes up with "...his old lady shot him last night". C&T laughs are totally genuine--and rightly so! I laugh EVERY TIME.