MONDO EXTRAS

TWoP: The A-Team was one of your biggest TV hits and you served as a producer and creative consultant on the feature film starring Liam Neeson and Bradley Cooper. From your perspective, how does the move compare to the show?

Cannell: It's a reset, but it's a great reset. The characters are very, very similar to the characters that we had [on the show], but they're updated versions. The tone of the movie is a little darker-- we were doing the Road Runner on the The A-Team; we're not doing that with this. People can die in the The A-Team movie, but the humor is there, the relationship between the four characters is there and the comedy is there. Joe Carnahan directed the picture -- he just did a lights-out job, in my opinion. Ridley Scott's our executive producer. I was really happy with it, though it took forever to get the script right since we had so many writers on it, but once Ridley and Joe Carnahan and [co-screenwriter] Brian Bloom came in, it was a new game. I'm really excited about it.

TWoP: And can you confirm that in the A-Team movie, when they fire 100 rounds in a scene, some of those are actually going to hit people?

Cannell: [laughs] It's liable to happen!

TWoP: I just hope there's a scene where the guys take a machine gun apart and then immediately put it back together again, like they did in every episode of the show.

Cannell: Well, I don't think that's in there, but you're gonna like the movie. And the thing that's great about it is that people who remember The A-Team and then take their kids to the movie, they're not gonna go, "Well this is a rip; this isn't what I was looking for." There's been a lot of examples of TV shows that have been re-hung and turned out -- like Wild, Wild West is the greatest example of a total misfire. You won't feel that way about this. You're gonna feel you got what you signed up for.