According to a 1998 TV Guide article, show creator Rick Rosner was a reserve deputy with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. During a coffee break on an evening patrol shift in the mid-1970s he saw two young CHP officers on motorcycles which gave him the idea for this series. He later created 240-Robert, which seemed like a hybrid of “CHiPs” and Emergency!.
The character of Ponch was originally conceived to be Italian (”Poncherini”), but when Erik Estrada won the part, the character was changed to Hispanic American.
Episodes occasionally reference Jon Baker’s service in Vietnam. This makes his character one of the earliest regular (and one of the more positive) portrayals of a Vietnam Veteran on television. In real life Larry Wilcox served 13 months in Vietnam as a Marine artilleryman.
Though public perception links the later P-Series Kawasaki Police Special with the series, in fact they rode the C-Series Kawasaki, which had an oval windshield rather than the later model’s fiberglass fairing.
Filming locations were generally in the San Fernando Valley of California. Freeway crashes were performed on recently constructed highways that were not yet open to the public. For the first season, the Glendale Freeway (Highway 2) in Montrose, California was used. After the first season, the intersection of the Foothill Freeway (Interstate 210) and the Simi Valley Freeway (Highway 118) in Sylmar, California were used. For the racing scenes in the episode “Drive, Lady, Drive” they used the Riverside International Raceway in Riverside, California.
Although doubles were used for far-off shots and various stunt or action sequences, Wilcox and Estrada did a great deal of their own motorcycle riding, and performed many smaller stunts themselves. Although Wilcox emerged relatively injury-free, Estrada suffered various injures several times throughout the run of the series. In several early first season episodes, a huge bruise or scar can be seen on his arm after he was flung from one of the motorcycles and skidded along the ground. But his worst accident came when was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident while filming an episode in August 1979, fracturing several ribs and breaking both wrists. The accident and Estrada’s subsequent hospitalization was incorporated into the series’ storyline.
Prior to being cast in CHiPs Estrada had no experience with motorcycles, so he underwent an intensive eight-week course, learning how to ride. In 2007 it was revealed that he didn’t hold a motorcycle license at the time CHiPs was in production, and only qualified for a license after three attempts, while preparing for an appearance on a reality television show, Back To The Grind.
Estrada and Wilcox never drew their firearms over the course of the series; however, they did in CHiPs 99. The only character on the series to ever draw his firearm on camera was Baricza (Brodie Greer). He did so three times: Once (his radio car’s Ithaca 37 shotgun) in the episode “Rainy Day”, where the CHiPs conduct a felony traffic stop of a motorhome-based rolling casino; the second time while being attacked by a karate-trained vehicle burglar named Billy (played by Danny Bonaduce) in the episode, “Karate”. In that episode, Billy (armed with nunchaku), gains the upper hand on Officer Baricza, at which point Baricza feels he has no other choice but to draw his weapon (a large framed Smith & Wesson revolver) in a dramatic moment. Billy then wisely runs in retreat to a waiting getaway van. Finally, he also drew down on two hillbillies (who were armed with a Tommy-gun and a double-barrel shotgun) that had ambushed his unattended patrol car for fun in the second season premiere “Peaks and Valleys,” but the obvious action was only implied (as his hand/wrist motion was just below camera range) rather than actually shown to viewers.
During the original run of the series, syndicated reruns of older episodes were retitled CHiPs Patrol to avoid confusion. Later syndicated reruns after the show went out of production reverted to the original title.
