Miami News Blog

?Twenty five years ago this week, NBC launched a show featuring a salt-and-pepper team of undercover cops who ran roughshod over the streets of America's most tropical city. Executive produced by Michael Mann, who at that time was best known for writing the first four episodes of Starsky and Hutch, the series would go on to glamorize crime and criminalize glamour in a way no other show ever had. It also made stars of a couple pastel-suited upstarts nobody had ever heard of before.

That show, of course, was Miami Vice. Don Johnson played Sonny Crockett, a wise-cracking, Ferrari-driving ladies' man who lived on a sail boat and kept a pet alligator. Philip Michael Thomas played Ricardo Tubbs, who believed himself also to be quite a hit with the ladies, but never quite cottoned to Crockett's alligator.

But in addition to a formidable slate of up-and-coming actors (Viggo Morgenson, Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemi et al), Miami Vice was also known to invite an array of guest stars that can only be considered kooky.  So to celebrate a quarter century of new wave badness, Riptide looks back on 10 of the kookiest guest stars ever to run with Crockett and Tubbs. Let us know if we've left out anyone.

1. Gene Simmons played a drug dealer named Newton Blade in the episode titled "Prodigal Son," which opened season two. Also starring that week was song-and-dance man Peter Allen, Pam Grier (aka Coffey) and Charles S. Dutton (aka Rock), but it was the Kiss bassist who had everyone watching their tongues.

2. Power Station, of course, played themselves; unfortunately the new wave supergroup did so after Robert Palmer had been replaced by Michael Des Barres, who knew Don Johnson and hooked up the gig. From the YouTube clip, they're performing at Firehouse Four. But their version of T. Rex's "Bang a Gong" lacks inspiration. No wonder John Taylor and Andy Taylor fled back to Duran Duran.



3. Little Richard played a street preacher opposite David Strathairn in the episode "Out Where the Buses Don't Run." The opening, which featured The Who's "Baba O'Riley," certainly inspired CSI.

4. Miles Davis played a pimp named Ivory Jones on the episode called "Junk Love." We're not sure how the recalcitrant jazz legend felt about the producers playing Wang Chung in the background while he was onscreen.

5. G. Gordon Liddy actually appeared twice on Vice, both times as the inexplicably named Mr. Real Estate aka Capt. William Maynard. Liddy's first appearance, in '85's "Back in the World," marked his acting debut. And Don Johnson must've dug it. Because he directed him to near perfection.