Starsky & Hutch film and a video game. The series' protagonists were two Southern California police detectives: David Michael Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser), the dark-haired, Brooklyn transplant and U.S. Army veteran, with a street-wise manner and intense, sometimes childlike moodiness; and Kenneth Richard "Hutch" Hutchinson (David Soul), the divorced, blond, Duluth, Minnesota, native with a more reserved and intellectual approach. Under the radio call sign "Zebra Three", they were known for usually tearing around the streets of fictional Bay City, California. The vehicle of choice was Starsky's two-door Ford Gran Torino, which was bright red, with a large white vector stripe on both
Starsky & Hutch California freeway with a flat-tired Ford Explorer). At the first viewing of the car with David Soul (Hutch), Glaser remarked that the car looked like a "striped tomato." That nickname stuck, and very soon the show's writers had worked it into the show as Hutch's derogatory name for Starsky's beloved Torino. Glaser remarked to Soul that he hated the car and that he was "going to destroy that car...burn it down every chance I get", and repeated the story in the 1999 "reunion" interview. Several scenes of Glaser driving the car show him smashing the front wheels into curbs as