One of the themes I’d like to explore down the line in this blog is the power of popular culture to define generations and transcend boundaries, national and otherwise. Ask anyone who grew up in South Africa during the 1980s about their favourite TV shows and you will get a list encompassing everything from Maya the Bee to Spiderman, to The A-Team — as well as a long and animated discussion involving recall of favourite theme songs and characters.
(My favourite character was Murdoch from The A-Team. He was mad, but a great pilot. I could relate to that.)
The show I loved the most, more than Knightrider, more than The A-Team, more, even than the Gummi Bears (Gummi Bearrrrrs, bouncing here and there and everywhere...) was Airwolf.
At the age of eleven, I was obsessed with it. Stringfellow Hawke (Jan-Michael Vincent) was kinda cool because he lived alone in a log cabin by a lake and played the cello and looked soulful, even if he did have a wrinkly neck. And I was very fond of Ernest Borgnine. But that helicopter was just breathtaking. The way it rose out of The Chimney with that controlled combination of a roar and a scream, the way bullets bounced off its sleek black skin, the way it could fire guns and Sidewinder missiles …
No doubt Bruno Bettelheim would have something to say about it, but I was completely and utterly enthralled by that machine. Already fascinated by fighter jets (my favourite was the F-14 Tomcat, which starred in Top Gun), Airwolf appeared on screen at just the right time to feed my burgeoning adolescent obsession with beautiful, dangerous flying machines.*
I spent hours drawing versions of it, improving it, making it bigger, adding even more weaponry. My mother was terribly excited by all my drawings; she was convinced I was showing signs of becoming an engineer.
How wrong she was.
I was reminded of my fascination with Airwolf recently when I happened across this news item. It turns out to be about a man who has had sex with over 1 000 cars (quite what having sex with a car entails is never revealed, somewhat disappointingly). Not only that, but he once had his way with the helicopter from Airwolf:
“But his wandering eye has spread beyond cars to other vehicles. He says that his most intense sexual experience was ‘making love’ to the helicopter from the 1980s TV hit Airwolf.”
So that beautiful piece of engineering has been sullied by a grubby American from Washington State who normally showers his dubious attentions on Volksie Beetles. It is so wrong. I cannot even begin to describe how wrong it is.
Not even the continued decline of Jan-Michael Vincent, who once looked like this, and, thanks to decades of booze, now looks like this, is as wrong as what that man did to that helicopter.
(On that point, four years or so ago I met the spitting image of Jan-Michael Vincent at a Joburg marketing seminar. When I said, “You look like …” I could see him deflate visibly. “I know,” he sighed. And then his phone rang. It was, you guessed it, the theme tune from Airwolf. His friends set it up for him, he explained. They thought it was funny.)
The years have not been kind to Jan-Michael Vincent, or, indeed, to many other stars of small screen action adventure. But my golden memories of the great TV shows of the 80s will remain forever.
* My absolute, absolute favourite of all time was, and is, the SR-71 Blackbird. A reconnaissance aircraft rather than a fighter jet, I rendered several pencil drawings of it when I was in Std 5. It was a design classic built of titanium, insanely fast, and we will never see its like again.
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