Fez gets Ponch

By Joshua Tyler Dec 8, 2005, 16:49 GMT

Hollywood continues it's trend of making fun of 70's and 80's television by adapting the decades' best shows into parodies. The next classic series on the mocking block is 'CHiPs'. It's almost too easy.

Warner Bros. has acquired the rights to the show, and according to The Hollywood Reporter they've hired "The 70's Show's" Wilmer Valderrama to star as motorcycle cop Ponch. Ponch you may remember, was originally played by Latin heartthrob Erik Estrada. Estrada was last seen trying to talk sense to Vanilla Ice on VH1's "The Surreal Life". Your heart has to go out to the guy.

"CHiPs" for those who don't remember, was a show about two California Highway Patrol motorcycle officers named Francis "Ponch" Poncherello and Jon Baker, played by Larry Wilcox. The show was not a comedy. It was a serious police show (at least for the time), though it has since built a strange sort of following as a piece of vintage camp. For pure cheese value, that theme song can't be beat.

The movie on the other hand, will take those characters and turn the whole thing into an action-comedy built around Valderrama. Wilmer should actually be a good fit in the part, and "That 70's Show" has already proven a fertile training ground for comedic talent. The show has already launched Ashton Kutcher and Topher Grace on to bigger careers in feature film.

Wilmer is currently starring in the final season of "That 70's Show", which limps on without Kutcher or Grace. He's also just finished filming a movie with Brian Cox called 'El Muerto'. It's a drama in which he plays a young man killed and then resurrected by the Aztec God of Death as a slave.