Take The A-Team. As a TV show, it was a pure example of the pop-culture past repackaged into cheesy, chewy, prefab-digestible form. Obviously, you can say that about a lot of things on TV, but The A-Team was a show that wore its cardboard-action derivative thinness proudly. Basically, with its squad of outlaw heroes — commandos as “war criminals” — trying to plot and improvise their way through a weekly tactical mission, it was The Dirty Dozen crossed with Mission: Impossible, and with one additional, almost eerily karmic overlap. The show premiered just two months after the release of the original Rambo movie, First Blood (1982). And either through zeitgeist coincidence or the likely possibility that the series’ creator/writer/producers, Stephen J. Cannell and Frank Lupo, were familiar with the 1972 David Morrell novel on which First Blood was based, The A-Team‘s Vietnam backstory — during the war, the team members carried out a violent mission as ordered, and were then hung out to dry by their superiors — totally echoed the fate of the Sylvester Stallone character (a Vietnam vet) in the hit paramilitary thriller. Like the movie, the show served up action-packed suicide-mission macho as a form of “anti-establishment” kicks.

There was, of course, an additional Stallone connection: Mr. T first dive-bombed his way into American culture in Rocky III (1982), where, as the relentless, in-your-face, this-is-white-America’s-worst-nightmare Clubber Lang, he was vicious and cool and — yes — kind of scary. (He had to be; it was Stallone’s way of upping the ante on Apollo Creed.) Since Mr. T, in spirit, was more pro wrestler than actor, he gave the same essential performance on The A-Team, only now, in all his Mohawked warrior finery, he was cuddly: Clubber Lang as gruff good guy. He still had his I-pity-the-fool charisma, but he was a walking emblem of Rerun Nation from the moment he stepped onto the A-Team set.

http://movie-critics.ew.com/2010/06/12/the-karate-kid-and-a-team-remakes/