When it comes to the subject of ripoffs, television has had its share. Some of the mor obvious examples include the blatant Saturday Night Live rip-off called Fridays that lasted a season back in 1980. I guess you really couldn’t call Fridays an inferior knock off because – sorry – Saturday Night Live was weighted down by a lot of bad and unfunny sketches.

If there ever was a ridiculous concept for ripping off another network, however, it would have been the one two punch combination of Super Train and Aloha Paradise which were Love Boat and Fantasy Island knock offs that didn’t exactly spawn a whole lot of success when they were dumped on the NBC schedule in 1979.

NBC at the time was suffering from dismal ratings and on the verge of collapse thanks to the work of Fred Silverman, the man who was a superstar behind the success of ABC and CBS prior to jumping into the NBC mix. (It was Silverman who opted t run Roots as a mini-series as opposed to a one hour weekly series and the rest was history) Of course, approving awful ideas such as Super Train and Aloha Paradise along with even worse concepts such as the idiotic Pink Lady and Jeff essentially sealed the doom of NBC and, oh boy, was the doom and gloom that befell NBC anything but pretty….To be continued.