The A-Team: The Complete Collection [DVD]

Unfairly imprisoned for committing a bank robbery during the waning days of the Vietnam War (no one could prove they were just following orders), the members of the A-Team, a unit of highly specialized undercover operatives, manages to escape from prison and set about to clear their names by working as soldiers-of-fortune throughout the world. This is the premise established by the two-hour pilot episode of The A-Team and carried out during the series' first season. Led by cigar-chomping, disguise-happy Hannibal Smith (George Peppard), the team includes B.A. (Mr. T), a musclebound black weapons expert; ace pilot "Howling Mad" Murdock (Dwight Schultz), who has to be busted out of a mental institution for each assignment; and all-around wheeler dealer "Faceman" Peck, played in the opening episode by Tim Dunigan and thereafter by Dirk Benedict. Also along for the ride is plucky girl reporter Amy Allen (Melinda Culea), one of the few "outsiders" who believes in the team's innocence. Relentlessly pursuing the A-Team in hopes of either locking them up permanently or seeing them all hang is a certain Col. Lynch (William Lucking). In the two-hour opening episode, Amy Allen sets out to prove that the shadowy A-Team really exists and becomes involved in the team's plan to rescue one of her fellow reporters from kidnappers in Mexico. The season's remaining hour-long episodes find the team being hunted down "Most Dangerous Game" style by a loony cult leader, saving B.A.'s girlfriend from the clutches of a corrupt prison warden who stages illegal to-the-death gladiatorial battles, matching wits with a rogue SWAT team that commits murders on the side, going head-to-head with a small-town biker gang, taking on the Mob in Las Vegas on behalf of two coeds who are worried about the safety of their professor, championing the cause of New York shopkeepers who are being terrorized by a protection racket, crash-landing in the mountains where they try to save an innocent man from being lynched, protecting a group of farmers from a land-greed rancher, saving a young girl from a forced marriage, attempting to free passengers of a hijacked airliner despite Murdock's temporary blindness, and shielding a small town from a band of crazed murderers. And in an ironic twist, the very government that is determined to clap the A-Team behind bars must solicit the team's aid in order to rescue a general and his daughter who are being held by terrorists in the heart of Borneo.