Simon & Simon Episode “Trapdoors” (1981)
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Three weeks after Simon & Simon debuted on CBS, “Trapdoors” aired on December 8, 1981, as its third episode. What may first appear as a now-dated run-of-the-mill story about a boy using a home computer to steal money from a bank reveals something much more interesting once we look deeper.
The episode, written by show creator Phil DeGuere, is likely the first depiction of ‘computer hacking’ on television in a non-science fiction context. In the episode, young whiz kid Terry McDaniels (17-year-old Robbie Rist), uses his Apple II and an acoustic modem to access a bank’s computer system and modest sums of money. The vice-manager of the bank branch then forces the boy to help him steal even more money. This concept, novel for 1981, is notable for foreshadowing the emergence of “hacker” characters on film/TV and larger popular culture.
Keep in mind this is two years before the term ‘hacker’ even became widely used, as articles often referred to ‘computer raiders’ or ‘computer invaders’ in the news. The popular June 1983 film WarGames didn’t even use the term. But when the term ‘hacker’ was used for the first time by mainstream media on the cover of Newsweek Sept 5, 1983, it seemed to stick, and to the general public, the term computer hacking became synonymous with computer crime, unaware of any previous definition of the word.
Series creator Phil DeGuere was himself very knowledgeable about computers and technology. An early adopter of microcomputers for work uses such as scriptwriting, he once spent six days of a writer’s strike writing a database manager for recipes. His system for tracking daily production via computer software that he established for Simon & Simon was later adopted by the entire industry.
The “Trapdoors” episode also served as a precursor to DeGuere’s later series, Whiz Kids. Elements from “Trapdoors” show up two years later in Whiz Kids episode “A Chip Off the Old Block” (the first regular episode filmed after the pilot, although it was the fifth one aired). Here, a school bully begins harassing main character Richie, leading to him befriending Chip (Robbie Rist), another boy in computer class who has been using the school computers to make illicit bank transfers to his account to the tune of $2000 and withdrawing the money. But embezzlers at the bank use Chip’s unauthorized access to hide their theft of nearly a million dollars. The police suspect Richie, who uses his expertise to audit the banks system to assist in finding the real culprit, putting him, as well as the family dog Rabies in jeopardy when he threatens to uncover who the crooks are.
The “Chip” episode was a ‘mea culpa’ to critics of the Whiz Kids pilot, which had been lambasted by TV critics after an April 1983 showing for the press. Intended to show legal consequences for unauthorized access to computers (it wasn’t yet a crime), CBS directed that ”access to computers has to be through legal means.”
But two years earlier, “Trapdoors” presented a (somewhat) surprisingly realistic depiction of early computer hacking through the lens of a crime adventure series and showed what was churning in the mind of DeGuere. When cohort Bob Shayne wanted to produce a new series that would be ‘the Hardy Boys done right’ (going back to the original concept of boys in their mid-teens solving mysteries, and not college-age men as the Glen Larson/ABC series had done), his concept was altered right in the pitch meeting with Universal with DeGuere adding “and they’ll do it all with computers, and we’ll call it Whiz Kids!”
The full story of Whiz Kids was told in a documentary podcast series from Forgotten TV.
Whiz Kids Part One
Whiz Kids Part Two
The Whiz Kids Stars Speak
