Street Hawk ~ The complete promotion of dangerous driving.

Back in the mid-1980s American TV finally achieved something it had been threatening to do for years, it reached the upper peaks of cheesiness. Television viewers the world over thought that peak had been reached with both the A-Team and Airwolf, but those shows while being inherently cheesy had a few qualities that lifted them into the lower echelons of comedy drama. But with Street Hawk the TV executives had struck the golden cheese!

It was bad, so terribly bad, yet I loved it. I suppose back in the 80s I loved anything to do with speed (still do I guess), and I was fascinated by the idea of detective work, whether that be by the police or a genius P.I. TV shows like TJ Hooker, CHiPs, Magnum P.I and The Fall Guy were all favourites of mine. Street Hawk combined the 2 and thus was instant success in my juvenile mind.

Basically Street Hawk was about a police officer and his pet, top secret government motorbike. This was a bike designed to go fast, now you may say that all bikes are designed for that, however Street Hawk was so fast that it could fucking outrace the Starship Enterprise! At warp 10! And with the guy riding it looking in no danger of ever falling off. In fact our hero looked so relaxed while riding the bike he could have been chilling in his favourite armchair with his morning newspaper instead of travelling at ridiculous speeds and enduring insane amounts of G force.

This is Jesse Mach, an ex-motorcycle cop, injured in the line of duty. Now a police troubleshooter, he's been recruited for a top secret government mission to ride Street Hawk--an all-terrain attack motorcycle designed to fight urban crime, capable of incredible speeds up to three hundred miles an hour...and immense firepower. Only one man, federal agent Norman Tuttle, knows Jesse Mach's true identity. The man...the machine...Street Hawk.

There we have the introduction to our hero, all around American nice guy Mr Jesse Mach. This introduction always followed on from the opening theme music:

If you’ve read any of my earlier blog posts, you’ll know just how much I enjoyed the theme music.

What isn’t said above is that while Jesse Mach is a police officer by day, at night when out breaking light speed records he’s a friggin’ vigilante, and his own daytime boss wants to arrest him. Said boss doesn’t know that one of his underlings is the ruthless vigilante motorcycle warrior. Well obviously otherwise he’d just slap the cuffs on him when he arrived for work in the morning and bitch slap him a few times just for the trouble he’s caused.

You have to wonder though, if he’s pulling a full shift during the day and riding around like a one man army at night, when does he find the time to sleep? Is Jesse Mach actually A) a robot, B) possessed by his own bike or C) a shit police officer who sleeps on the job? Due to America cancelling the show we’ll never know the answer. I like option B personally, so I’ll let myself stick with that explanation.

So there we have Street Hawk, a man possessed by a bike to hunt down criminals, while evading the law and acting like a criminal.