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.