Street Hawk: High Performance, Hollywood Style
Street Hawk: High Performance, Hollywood Style
EDITORIAL
Silly, but a step in the right direction anyway
Paul Dean
MOVE OVER, MICHAEL KNIGHT. OUT OF the way, KITT. You’re no longer alone in your high-speed, space-age pursuit of truth, justice and the American way. Street Hawk is here, and he’s got a few tricks up his high-tech sleeve that might impress even you.
Street Hawk, for anyone who doesn’t already know, is ABC’s new Friday-night series in which a motocross-racer-turned-cop moonlights as a crime-fighting vigilante and uses a motorcycle to chase down the bad guys. But not just any motorcycle, mind you; this one makes most of the hardware seen in science-fiction movies seem almost primitive by comparison. Designed by a computer wizard whose dream is “to have a Street Hawk in every police garage in the country,” the bike supposedly is an “all-terrain pursuit vehicle” that cost $3 million to build. It cruises at a mere 200 mph, but its top speed is 300 mph when it’s punched into hyper-thrust—whatever that is. But wait: There’s more. The Street Hawk’s compressed-air vertical lifters allow the bike to jump 100 feet into the air, and it has enough onboard sub-machine guns, lasers and missile launchers to do in even the most diabolic of villains.
What this amounts to, of course, is a two-wheel rip-off of Knight Rider, the successful NBC series about a computerized wondercar and its heroic driver. Street Hawk's premise is highly similar and every bit as preposterous, forcing the viewer to suspend all sense of reality as he watches the bike do giant backflips and blaze down city streets at 200 mph.
A lot of people, including most motorcycle enthusiasts, surely cringe at this theater of the absurd. But the program is not meant to be taken seriously. It’s not even aimed at adults in general and motorcyclists in particular; rather, it’s a crime-doesn’t-pay, action/fantasy series targeted at the same pre-teen male audience that has kept Knight Rider alive and well—and on good terms with his banker—for the past couple of seasons.
And it seems to be working. In the premier episode of a 13-week run, the
show ranked 2 1 st out of 69 rated programs. The next week it dropped slightly, but came back the following Friday to win its time slot with a higher rating than even a Clint Eastwood movie shown at the same time. Street Hawk's associate producer, Medora Heilbron, is so pleased with the show’s ratings that the fact it has been “slaughtered” by the critics doesn’t bother her. “After all,” she says, “Street Hawk is fantasy entertainment with lots of dazzle; we’re not doing Shakespeare.”
Indeed they are not. The hero in Street Hawk, Jesse Mach, is played by Rex Smith, a singer/actor who isn’t likely to fill his trophy case with Emmys for his work in this series. He doesn’t get much help from the writers, however, who see to it that some sort of inane dialogue issues from his lips at least once per scene. But Smith does exude a clean-cut, all-American, boy-next-door sort of image. And that, along with the prime-time portrayal of a motorcycle as an instrument of good rather than of evil, is a step in the right direction for bikes on TV.
Don’t forget, television is the same medium that has maligned motorcycling in some of the most ludicrous ways imaginable. Where else would you see hordes of outlaw dirt-bikers roaming the desert and killing crotchety old miners? Or Hell’s Angels clones who rape and pillage after storming into town on small-bore Japanese streetbikes? If screenwriters are going to crucify motorcycling in public they could at least get it right.
Getting it right is important, too,
for you should never underestimate the effect that stereotypes created on film can have in shaping public opinion. Back in 1954, for example, the writers, producers and actors of The Wild One had not the slightest inkling of the negative impact their film would have on motorcycling for decades to come. But as we all know, that impact was stunning, and it is still being felt today.
Obviously, it’s going to take more than a juvenile TV series to reverse what a film classic like The Wild One got rolling 31 years ago. But that doesn’t mean it can't try. And when Jesse Mach, an unlikely hero on an even more unlikely bike, hyperthrusts through millions of American living rooms every Friday night, he leaves behind the most positive image of motorcycles the tube has seen in a long time. Not since the days of Then Came Bronson have motorcycling fantasies been stirred in such a positive fashion. Even the long-running series CHiPs, which also pitted good-guy motorcycle cops against the forces of evil, didn’t have the potential to be as beneficial to the sport as Street Hawk seems to have, for the ne’er-do-wells on that show all too often used motorcycles in the commission of their nefarious deeds.
So don’t be too quick to pass judgment on Street Hawk. Ignore the fact that Mach’s motorcycle, a modified Honda XL500 Single wrapped in Star IFtfTS-style bodywork, has the distinct, unmistakable bark of an inline-Four. Don’t expect reality when you watch Mach climb into an “exact body-mold” racing suit and strap on an “aerotech” helmet, replete with magnifying faceshield and digital-readout displays, before going out to do battle with the heavies. Don’t worry about all of that.
But if you feel the need to worry about something anyway, worry about whether or not the series succeeds. Because if it does, Street Hawk just might do for motorcycle sales what Knight Rider has done for black Firebird Trans-Ams. If that happens, motorcyclists everywhere will be a little better off. And then, maybe they won’t care if Street Hawk isn’t Shakespeare.
