The A-Team  The A-Team is an American action-adventure television series that ran on NBC from 1983 to 1987 about former members of a fictitious United States Army Special Forces unit. The members, after being court-martialed "for a crime they didn't commit", escaped from military prison and, while still on the run, worked as soldiers of fortune. The series was created by Stephen J. Cannell and Frank Lupo. A feature film based on the series was released by 20th Century Fox in 2010. "The A-Team" was created by writers and producers Stephen J. Cannell and Frank Lupo at the behest of Brandon Tartikoff, NBC's Entertainment president. Cannell was fired from ABC in the early 1980s, after failing to produce a hit show for the network, and was hired by NBC; his first project was "The A-Team." Brandon Tartikoff pitched the series to Cannell as a combination of "The Dirty Dozen", "", "The Magnificent Seven", "Mad Max" and "Hill Street Blues", with "Mr. T driving the car". "The A-Team" was not generally expected to become a hit, although Stephen J. Cannell has said that George Peppard suggested it would be a huge hit "before we ever turned on a camera". The show became very popular; the first regular episode, which aired after Super Bowl XVII on January 30, 1983, reached 26.4% of the television audience, placing fourth in the top 10 Nielsen-rated shows. The show remains prominent in popular culture for its cartoonish violence (in which people were seldom seriously hurt, despite the frequent use of automatic weapons), formulaic episodes, its characters' ability to form weaponry and vehicles out of old parts, and its distinctive theme tune. The show boosted the career of Mr. T, who portrayed the character of B. A. Baracus, around whom the show was initially conceived. Some of the show's catchphrases, such as "I love it when a plan comes together", "Hannibal's on the jazz", and "I ain't gettin' on no plane!" have also made their way onto T-shirts and other merchandise. The term "A-Team" is a nickname coined for U.S. Special Forces' Operational Detachments Alpha (ODA) during the Vietnam War. In a 2003 Yahoo! survey of 1,000 television viewers, "The A-Team" was voted the "oldie" television show viewers would most like to see revived, beating out such popular television series from the 1980s as "The Dukes of Hazzard" and "Knight Rider".