{"id":43248,"date":"2015-12-22T16:00:07","date_gmt":"2015-12-22T16:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.influx.co.uk\/?p=43248"},"modified":"2022-06-15T11:19:17","modified_gmt":"2022-06-15T10:19:17","slug":"kojaks-buick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adrianflux.co.uk\/influx\/blog\/kojaks-buick\/","title":{"rendered":"Kojak’s Buick"},"content":{"rendered":"

Who loves ya baby?!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Anyone bought up with long, boring Sunday afternoons in the 1970s will recognise those four little words instantly.<\/p>\n

TV cop Kojak’s catchphrase wasn’t the only reason for the shows enduring appeal. Hollywood tough guy Telly Savalas’s lollypop sucking Greek detective was the sort of hard man who had a sensitive side – employing his family and looking after the ladies with aplomb.<\/p>\n

But of course, as a kid obsessed with matchbox toys and shoot outs, you couldn’t miss the car chases and lethargic handbrake turns, the magnetic flashing lights attached to the roof and the burbling boat-like grumbling of those heavy American lumps.<\/p>\n

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Kojak couldn’t have been the first show to have threaded through its structure a series of almost-slo-mo car chases, and it certainly wasn’t the last, but in retrospect it seems mystifying that the tv franchise was able to trade off the brown Buick that was Kojak’s crime-fighting chariot.<\/p>\n

I’m pretty sure I got this toy car for Christmas in around 1978.<\/p>\n

Underlying the narrative in this show, set in NYPD in the seventies and therefore riddled with corruption, philandering and criminal negligence – was that Kojak was just hanging on to his moral high-ground despite the nefariousness all around him.<\/p>\n

It was perhaps fitting then that this unglamorous brown Buick was an unexpected star of the show – emblematic of a dour reality of a skint New York city trundling around chasing the villains without while ignoring the criminals within.<\/p>\n

Enough with the cultural criticism you say.<\/p>\n

But I’d still love to find that Corgi Buick in my stocking this year. <\/strong><\/p>\n