I pity the fool who didn’t get “The A-Team” first time around. Oh, wait. That would be me. Goodness how I loathed the show when it rolled off the Universal Television assembly line in ’83, assault weapons blazing.

Now I realize I was taking my cumulative annoyance with TV’s general state of arrested development out on an action-adventure series that was not only good-natured and unpretentious but inventive and pretty funny as well. The running jokes about having to dose flight-phobic B.A. Baracus (Mr. T) with knockout drugs to get him to assignments abroad are a hoot, and so are the facial contortions and assorted foreign accents of “Howling Mad” Murdoch (Dwight Schultz), a sort of screw-loose Lon Chaney.

In addition to those two clowns, the team – wrongly accused and imprisoned Vietnam commandos, we’re told, who escaped, went underground and became do-gooder soldiers of fortune – included cigar-chomping, idea-hatching leader Hannibal Smith (George Peppard) and handsome con artist Templeton “Face” Peckman (Dirk Benedict).

Together they were like superheroes without costumes (well, except for Mr. T), more akin to Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four than the stolid secret agents of “Mission: Impossible.”

Vilified for its “mindless” violence in its time, “The A-Team” looks tame today, its cheap effects – exploding sheds and somersaulting jeeps – quaintly phony. And for all the rounds of machine-gun fire per episode, hardly anyone gets seriously hit. It’s about as bloody as Hopalong Cassidy or Roy Rogers shows were three decades earlier.

What stands out in the artillery department are the crude tanks, cannons and battering rams Hannibal, B.A. and company fashioned from discarded appliances and junk. Their Rube Goldberg ingenuity presaged the rise of machine-shop improv shows (i.e., “Robot Wars,” “Monster Garage”) that now dominate whole cable channels.

“Hill Street Blues” is often cited as the most influential show of the 1980s. Actually, it may be a tie.

“The A-Team” originally aired on NBC 1983-87. Season two was recently released on DVD.