YMMV / Emergency!

• Growing the Beard:
  • It took a while for the show to hit its stride. About the length of time it took for Chet and Marco to grow their Porn Staches and Gage to grow his mullet.
  • You can trace the subtle development of TV shooting styles through the 70s by watching ER scenes on the show. The first few seasons look like sick bay scenes from Star Trek, shot in a wide, flat master, the action plays slow and the blocking is designed around wringing the drama out of every line (indeed many episodes were shot by Star Trek director Joseph Pevney). As the series goes on, the camera gets more handheld, gets closer to the action, and the dialogue runs much faster.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Since the airing of the Emergency! TV movie "Survivor on Charter #220", there have been two mid-air collisions in Southern California...the first one happening just SIX MONTHS after the movie originally aired. Even worse...neither of the people in the planes involved in both incidents survived the collisions, PLUS there were fatalities on the ground due to the crashes as well.
  • An early season 5 episode features a woman whose son is displaying early signs of polio. She at first insisted it had to be something else then said that she hadn't gotten him the vaccine because she thought it had been controlled to the point where it was impossible to contract the disease any more. Due to the anti-vax movement of the 2010s & the resulting outbreaks of diseases that were thought to be nearly eradicated and/or under control (not to mention the horrifying death rate of anti-vaxxers during the Covid-19 pandemic after vaccines became available), this really hits hard, despite the show being from the 1970s.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Johnny. It’s easier to name the characters someone hasn’t paired him with.
• Narm: As a Jack Webb show these are to be expected:
  • The non-action scenes at the fire station come off as really corny now, and the dispatch klaxon is usually the signal that the interesting parts of the show have started.
  • Dixie has several soliloquies usually starting with some variation of "I'm tired, Kel. Tired of the..." and summarizing why this job is slowly getting to her or why something in the ER that day is an intolerable injustice.
  • It seems like the relatives of the victims were given one or two lines to say repeatedly and instructed to do so as blandly as possible.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • John Travolta had his first role as an injured hiker in "Kids."
  • Erik Estrada has an uncredited role in "Details" as a Spanish-speaking man whose eyes were injured in a fire.
• Shipping: Predictably, mostly involving Johnny/Roy slash, though every now and then you get much more out-there ones. Frequently results in Die for Our Ship for Joanne.
• Stock Footage Failure: In season one, the paramedics drive a 1973 model Dodge with a silver front bumper ... except in the parts where they are rushing to a fire in a late-60's model with a red bumper. The red bumper truck is from the movie that served as the series pilot.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • The show is this due to attempts to be as medically and technologically up-to-the-minute accurate as possible. Among the many cases of Science Marches On and Technology Marches On, the hair and clothing styles, and "mother-may-I" need to talk to the doctors at the hospital to do anything, the show is very firmly entrenched in the 1970s.
  • Considering that paramedics and their variants are now a standard part of emergency medical practices, the sight of people arguing against their very purpose and function look even more idiotic now than ever. It should be remembered, however, that the pilot was filmed when the program was still experimental, and Dr. Brackett’s objections reflect real-life concerns brought up at the time.
  • At the time, EMS education was very limited, with paramedic programs lasting only 200 hours or so ("90-day Kildares" as Brackett says in the pilot). Nowadays, paramedics are given associate’s (two year) degrees, with clinical knowledge on par with nurses.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Chet spends the entirety of "Peace Pipe" making racist jokes about Johnny's Native American heritage. It's played for laughs but John clearly does not find it funny and says so. It's also Truth in Television, as Randy Mantooth himself is of Native American heritage.
  • In several episodes, Johnny continually attempts to get women to go out with him, despite their initial (and sometimes very strong) "NO". Today, that'd be sexual harassment, not to mention grossly unprofessional in those cases where he hits on a patient.
  • In "School Days", the team's solution to a report of a rattlesnake having curled up on the belly of a sleeping college student is to knock the animal away with a broom and then freeze it to death with a fire extinguisher. The possibility of catching it alive once it's been pushed out of biting-range isn't mentioned - something that would certainly not be the case today, when not-so-cuddly animals' ecological importance is more appreciated - and when it turns out to be a rubber fake planted on the sleeper as a prank, there are no repercussions for the pranksters' wasting paramedics' time.

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