"Lights, Camera, Action!" -- 15 of TV’s Most Famous Vehicles
Lights, camera, action! The small screen has delivered some big hits over the decades — and more often than not the car has been the star. Here are 15 of our favorites, revisited whilst wearing a pair of rose-tinted glasses. See how many you remember.
Charlie’s Angels, 1976
Charles Townsend, owner of L.A.-based Townsend Investigations detective agency, gives his all-female operatives their instructions through a loudspeaker in his deserted office. Charlie’s Angels came high-kicking on to our TV screens and stayed around for five series until 1981 — 115 shows in all — complete with lip gloss, big hair, handguns, and some rather lame 1970s Fords. The original lineup starred Jaclyn Smith as Kelly Garrett, Farrah Fawcett-Majors as Jill Munroe, and Kate Jackson as Sabrina Duncan, all supposedly ex-LAPD officers. Sabrina drove a Pinto and Kelly a Mustang II, but it was Jill’s V8 Mustang II Cobra that became synonymous with the show, even after Fawcett-Majors left after the first season and Cheryl Ladd grabbed the Cobra’s keys.
Starsky and Hutch, 1975
For many, this is the ultimate TV car. When the first series of Starsky and Hutch was broadcast on America’s ABC, the switchboard of Spelling Goldberg Productions in Beverly Hills was jammed with calls from people eager to know what the car was, and where they could get one. The way it had been dressed up for filming was almost as sensational as the pin-ups Dave Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser) and Ken “Hutch” Hutchinson (David Soul) — TV’s first detectives ever to be plastered on girls’ bedroom walls.
Starsky’s ’76 Gran Torino got its distinctive livery of red bodywork with a white stripe along the flanks and over the roof at the suggestion of producer Aaron Spelling. It also gained fat, five-slot kidney-bean mag wheels, and jacked-up suspension. Around a dozen cars were used for all kinds of sequences, including action scenes with an innovative roof-mounted camera. Ford slaked demand by building 1000 limited-edition replicas for public sale, now very valuable.
