One day in 1990, the heavenly incandescence of truth blazed down on me and I sat bolt upright in professor Sidney Fine's American History 102 lecture at the University of Michigan and thought: "There was a hidden ramp. There was always a ramp!" A Dodge Diplomat that plows into the back of a Chevy Caprice will not normally launch into a suborbital corkscrew roll before landing somewhere over the state line. It will just collapse like a steel milk carton into junk and busted plastic, which would make bad television. So the bastards put ramps back there. Of course, I blame the media of my youth for the fact that I didn't figure this out until my early 20s. When I grew up, well before everybody on planet Earth was issued a video camera, the only places to reliably see car crashes were in the cinema or on prime time. You knew when a crash was imminent because the frame suddenly cut from the chase to some housewife unloading her cupcakes or a piano truck pulling out of an alley. Then it cut back to the stunned face of the bad guy. And then, time . . . slowed . . . down. As with everything else about the Cold War, the rules were understood and life was reassuringly predictable. In 1980s TV land, the cars were as important to a show as whatever campy name that Stephen J. Cannell, Glen A. Larson, or Donald P. Bellisario gave a hero. Magnum prowled Oahu, Hawaii, in a borrowed Ferrari because he'd look like a hairdresser in a Datsun. Hardcastle and McCormick crammed into the Coyote X, a fiberglass fakey-doo McLaren that was Brian Keith's punishment for Family Affair. And the General Lee was the South's devastating answer to books and opera. READ MORE ››
from Car and Driver Blog http://blog.caranddriver.com
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