Turbo Boost

I was browsing a few stores looking for some good deals, mainly for games of course. However, apart from these "Get these 2 crappy games for the price of 1" deals there wasn't much of interest, except for one offer that knocked me off my socks. A Knight Rider DVD box set, selling for 30 Euros.

Who could refuse a whole season of David Hasselhoff goodness crammed on 6 DVDs? Well, I just barely could, after deciding a computerized Corvette-modeled car that runs at 400mph in a backstreet alley was too much of a luxury for now, but now I'm blaming myself I haven't closed the deal right away in that store. I bet someone now snatched it, because any box featuring David Hasselhoff isn't likely to be sitting around on that shelf for more than 30 minutes. Still, my love for series like Knight Rider exemplifies the fact that I see the 80's as a lost decade in my personal history.

It's more the feeling of having lost the 80's due to the fact I was 5 years old when it neared its end. I never consciously moved around in the 80's. I missed Talk Talk's smash hit 'Such A Shame' by a few years. I never saw the message 'INSERT COIN' flashing on the screen of an arcade machine. Well, I did, but not in the 80's, which automatically renders the message on said screen useless. I never ate Raider chocolate bars. Not that I ever would, but it's a missed chance forever. I never wore jeans with gaping holes in it just because it was fancy. If I do it now they either think I'm a car mechanic or just some backstreet couch potato who needs a haircut and a decent job instead of selling stolen TV's to trailer trash. There's something mystifying about things you vaguely remember but never took part in.

Back to David. While most people from my age will mark Transformers or other cartoons like that from the same era as the marking point in their audiovisual history, for me it is David Hasselhoff and KITT. Not even the real David, though, but the German translation. Synchronized of course. On German TV you rarely catch a series in its native language, which is why Germans still cannot speak a decent word of English. In any case, Dutch TV has never been big on imported series, so we had to watch the German channels to catch series like the A-Team and Knight Rider. And while I was way too young to understand one word of German gibberish there was something cool about the series, the attitude of that guy in his leather jacket with a black talking car. And the superb intro music. Just watching the action and listening to the music was good enough for me.

I might be reunited with David one day. It was the season two box set they were selling, but hey, I don't want to know how and why he got that car, I just want to see him push the 'Turbo Boost' button. Turbo Boost is a feature that can only have been invented in the 80's. The 80's is Turbo Boost to me, and I feel like I need to relive the experience I never had at 400 mph. In a backstreet alley, of course.