EDITOR AT LARGE
“Hey Kowalski, you out there? ” – Super Soul
A few days before my fingers hit the keyboard for this piece, my dad and I were chatting about movies – new ones we wanted to see and old ones we wanted to see again. Dad was feeling nostalgic for Kowalski and his high-speed delivery of a 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T in Vanishing Point (the Barry Newman, Cleavon Little original of course, and not the 1997 re-make with Viggo Mortensen and Jason Priestly). Kowalski’s run from Colorado to San Fran was only one of many movies from dad’s formative years to have a hot car, or bike featured prominently. There was Easy Rider, Bullit, The French Connection, Two Lane Blacktop, Le Mans, Gone in 60 Seconds and Smokey and The Bandit, to name but a few. Clearly this Hollywood trope of the 70s is one of the main reasons he grew to love vehicles as much as he did. And through his love, so did I. It’s no wonder, then, that as a kid, I’d grow up with a steady diet of TV shows like Knight Rider, the A-Team, Starsky and Hutch, The Rockford Files, The Fall Guy and those good ‘ole boys, The Dukes of Hazzard. I’m sure the hero-cars from each of those shows made the clunky plotlines and forced dialogue easier for dad to bear – they certainly aren’t what I remember from the episodes. Fast forward a few years (the VCR was just gain- ing traction afterall) and VHS copies of dad’s old favourites would find their way into our collection.
We’d share the couch on rainy Sundays where he’d reminisce and I’d study up. If I close my eyes, I can still hear those incredible, double-clutched shifts echo off of the San Bruno Mountain as McQueen’s ‘68 Mustang fastback hauls the mail in pursuit of the Dodge Charger, in Bullitt. Of course constant exposure to those classics has landed me squarely in the theatre for every flick from the “Fast” franchise since they debuted some twenty-two years ago. Working as a valet parking attendant, driving a racing-striped Neon R/T (with the requisite ‘fart-can’ exhaust), my colleagues and I were the demographic when the franchise launched. We devoured the ropey plot (that was better executed in Point Break, IMHO), counted the infinite number of gears every car seemed to have and giggled as if the NOS from the movie had trickled into our theatre with every terrible, quotable line. We were hooked. And yes, by the time you’ve read this I’ll have dragged my wife to see Fast X and will have tickets in hand for Gran Turismo. All of this is to say that, despite much of the doom and gloom talk surrounding the loss of combustion engines, manual transmissions and the perceived indifference of the next generation of motorheads, there is ample big and small screen fodder to keep passions lit and more keeps coming. Enjoy the show, but more than that, enjoy the cars!
MATTHEW NEUNDORF Editor At Large | VICARIOUS mneundorf@vicariourmag.com
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