Friday Linkblog, 90s-syndicated-action-tv edition

Back in the late 90s, there was a show called She Spies. I think it was on network TV originally, but it seemed to exist in the weird liminal time slots for syndicated shows on local channels—2 in the morning, late-afternoon on weekends.

The premise was a straightforward Charlier’s Angels ripoff. The three “She Spies” were former criminals who agreed to do missions for “the government” to work off their sentence, or something, most of which involved wearing tight shirts. The lead was Natasha Henstridge—yes from Species—surrounded by a cast of people you’ve never seen anywhere else.

What made She Spies stick in the memory two and a half decades later is that they immediately realized they didn’t have the budget to do an action show, so they pivoted to comedy. And while the actresses were not that great at fights, they were very, very funny.

It was not successful, and seems to have vanished from the collective memory. About every eighteen months I have to go look at the wikipedia page to prove to myself I didn’t dream it. No one I talk to has ever even heard of it.

I absolutely loved it.

It was lo- budget goofy cheese, but more importantly, everyone was in on the joke. Everyone knew exactly what show they were making, and leaned all the way in.

There’s a scene that’s stuck in my mind ever since I first saw it, back in my apartment in the late 90s. The She Spies are chasing the villain of the week—a tech millionaire, maybe? They run after him out of a… building? But he gets into his van and drives off. For… reasons? The She Spies don’t have a car so they can’t chase him.

Seconds later, the bad guy’s van screeches back into the parking lot where the She Spies are standing nonplussed. He gets out, slams the sliding door open, and out pours a swarm of Ninjas.

“Where did you get these guys!?” one of the She Spies asks.

There’s a flashback, and it shows the bad guy driving up to a hardware store where a crowd of migrant workers are waiting for work. Half of them are sterotypical Mexican day-laborers, the other half are are… literally ninjas, in full cartoon ninja garb, drinking coffee.

We snap back to the present, where the big action scene for the week commences.

At the time, I thought this was one of the funniest things I had ever seen. Ninjas as migrant day-laborers seems like an idea someone must have had before, but it was the first time I had ever seen it.

But! Time passed, and no one I ever met had ever seen this. Or even heard of it.

Every so often, I’d spend an afternoon on the google trying to prove this really existed. But no such luck. I started to wonder if maybe I had dreamed it—like that beer with the Skittles in it, you know, Skittlebräu.

Reader.

I finally found it.

All the episodes of the show somehow have ended up on youtube, and it turns out I didn’t dream it after all!

The action starts at about 38:32.

I had totally forgotten Biff/Maniac was in this! Even better than I remembered.