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'Once upon a time, there were three beautiful girls who went to the police academy, and they were each assigned very hazardous duties. But I took them away from all that and now they work for me. My name is Charlie."

John Forsythe's melodious tones may have started the beginning of every show, but it was lost on most of us. They may have worked for the Townsend Agency, but Charlie's Angels belonged to us. At the first hair flick, jiggle TV was on the air.

It was 1977. We were then just old enough to stay up late, just big enough to stake out our own place in front of the TV and just in time for Charlie's Angels. We'd missed out on the Beatles, RFK, Woodstock, Chicago 1968, the Moon landing, all the great television events of the era except that badly cast soap opera known as Watergate. But now, we had the Angels. They were ours. And best of all, we knew they could kick Jerry Garcia, Jerry Rubin and John Dean's asses. And look damn good doing it.

At first, it was the poster. "The Farrah poster came out when I was in Grade 4," says Sheri Elwood, the director of Deeply, which had its premiere at this year's Toronto International Film Festival. "All the boys had it. How could you compete?" Tens of millions of us, including John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, had it up in our bedrooms. It was the gateway to our fantasies of Farrah, the ultimate California girl. The sins that poster must have seen. It's strange because Farrah Fawcett-Majors, as she was known at the time, was only really an Angel for the first season, but for many, she personified the series. And in the logic you ferret out as a kid, it made perfect sense that she was married to the Six-Million Dollar Man. After all, who else would be good enough for an Angel?

Who indeed? At eight years old, I was convinced I would one day marry Jaclyn Smith. I was the love of her life. She just didn't know it yet. I didn't actually know it yet either because the woman I was in love with was named Kelly Garrett, the character Smith played on Charlie's Angels.

Everyone, in the playground, in the office and on the links, was in love with at least one Angel. It was a 1970s right of passage, like owning Frampton Comes Alive and the Grease soundtrack. "Charlie's Angels really had something for everyone," believes Mike Pringel, an L.A.-based actor and Web master who started Angelic Heaven, a Web site dedicated to all things Charlie in 1996. "Of course, it doesn't hurt that you had three beautiful girls running around, but there was also the camaraderie of the three women and that needs to be taken into account."

Created by producers Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg, the Angels, as we all know, were three police-trained detectives who had left the force to work for the unseen Charlie. Unlike so much of the TV we grew up with, like Three's Company, where a guy pretends to be gay so he can live with two single girls, or Hogan's Heroes, set in a PoW camp where the Nazis were almost quaint, the premise of Charlie's Angels rang true.

Well, it rang true to a point.

There was Sabrina Duncan, the sharp-as-a-tack multilingual leader, played by Kate Jackson. Having said that, I never remember anyone, male or female, saying Sabrina was their fave. She just didn't seem like much fun -- all turtlenecks, no bikinis. For bikinis, or occasionally less, we had the athletic Jill Munroe, played by Fawcett-Majors, and Kelly Garrett, the former showgirl who had, as they once said on the show, "been around."

To crack a case, the Angels posed as racing-car drivers, figure skaters and army recruits. They had cases in Vegas, at health spas, on yachts, at dude ranches -- you know, locations where not a lot of clothing is required.

I doubt very much that Spelling and Goldberg were planning to light the fuse of the gender revolution. As Spelling made perfectly clear when interviewed in 1977, "On this show, we're more concerned with hairdos and gowns than the twists and turns of the plots." But the Angels were fundamentally different in three respects. They had guns. They knew how to use them. And they were their own gang.

For men, young and old, it was all about sex. It wasn't the social-issues content that made Angels in Chains, the Oct. 27, 1976, show where the Angels go undercover in a woman's prison, the most popular episode ever. The strip-and-shower scene alone has no doubt worn out many a VCR pause button.

For women, however, the Angels were role models -- smart, sexy and independent. Sure, before them there had been Emma Peel of The Avengers and Julie Barnes of The Mod Squad -- but they were the sexy sidekicks, not the heroes. There was Angie Dickinson's Police Woman and The Bionic Woman. But Dickinson's Pepper Anderson character seemed more worried about breaking a nail than a case and the character Jaime Sommers would have never gotten anywhere if she hadn't been Col. Steve Austin's main squeeze. The Angels were different. As Elwood says, "They didn't have boyfriends." They were busy busting the baddies. Maybe too busy.

A three-decade study released by the University of Michigan in 1997, which specifically mentions Charlie's Angels, concluded that the changing role of women on TV is to blame for the increase in female aggression. "Television heroines began to use guns and muscle to attain their ends, just like the male heroes," noted research scientist L. Rowell Huesmann. "Now, little girls had aggressive characters to identify with, too."

Sociology has its place, but that finding does seem like a sign that the authors needed to get out more. The scheduling of Charlie's Angels was a reflection of the changing standards of network TV. When the show premiered in 1976, it was on at 10 p.m., just a bit too sexy for prime time. By the third season, it was on at 8 p.m., where it stayed until cancellation in 1981. For the public, the network and the advertisers, sexy, strong women had become okay.

Even Ayn Rand, the no-damn-fun author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, had an affinity for the Angels. Appearing on Donahue in the late seventies, Rand said that she loved Charlie's Angels because, "It's about three attractive girls doing impossible things. And that's what makes it interesting."

But for journalist Judith Coburn, Charlie's Angels is simply "a version of the pimp and his girls. Charlie dispatches his street-wise girls to use their sexual wiles on the world while he reaps the profits."

There are as many interpretations of the show as there were actresses playing the Angels. But the show did fuel a legacy that changed the perception of woman in the culture.

Granted, the legacy never totally killed off the stereotypes of simpering Mary Tyler Moore, who returned as Ally McBeal, or downtrodden Laverne and Shirley, who found offspring in dreck like Caroline in the City.

But the series did put the proverbial pedal to the metal all the way to Xena, Buffy, Tank Girl, Lara Croft, The X-Files' Scully, Courtney Love, Madonna, and ultimately Helen Mirren on Prime Suspect. Smart, sexy, sassy women who will beat it out of you if you mess with them. And look good doing it.

When we were young, we were all made of sugar candy. As we got older, we lost some of that flavour. My plans to marry Jaclyn Smith, for instance, fell by the wayside. But Charlie's Angels never did. Like Dorian Gray, they never age, they remain buoyant, braless and resilient. Some call it the miracle of syndication. Not so. As if we all don't all want more of that, because a spoonful of Seventies sugar really does help the medicine go down.

Special to The Globe and Mail