David Soul is dead: the secrets of the success of the “Starsky & Hutch” series

Like when they walked the streets of Bay City, Paul Michael Glaser AND Davide Anima They were the cop couple who exploded television ratings in the 1970s with the series Starsky and Hutch.

A few years ago, when they were no longer two TV stars but a couple of veterans in their seventh decade, they continued to be together through an unbreakable friendship. They helped each other, visited each other, loved each other with their souls. Strange case of a couple who remained together even beyond the filming set.

Their last public images together, several years ago, were in the ever-venerable Liverpool, England, where they attended the famous Comic Con. The sweet image shows Paul pushing the wheelchair where his friend David is sitting..

An unprecedented success

The television series was an unprecedented success. In the United States almost nothing has happened, but here people are marathoning like crazy: 92 episodes of 48 minutes each and a 90 minute pilot episodeall issued between April 30, 1975 and May 15, 1979.

The protagonists were two Californian police officers, the Latino David Starsky and the blond Kenneth Hutch Hutch(inson). Two beautiful and graceful gray hairs who raised fewer fines than women and moved above a formidable red Ford Torino with a long white ribbon. The sports car was Starsky’s.

The one and the other seemed night and day. Starsky, spontaneous, guarango, dirty, messy. Hutch: cultured, kind, elegant and with freshly pressed trousers. There was a third supporting character who was essential to the plot: a charming and quirky informant nicknamed Huggy Bear (Antonio Fargas).

In Argentina the series caused a sensation. More than 40 rating points on TV on the four channels. Numbers that today cannot even be reached by adding Tinelli’s best seasons.

In 1977, two years after the strip closed, concern about violence on television led the writers to cut the action scenes and replace them with more romantic developments. The popularity declined even more in the US, but here we didn’t even notice and everything continued full steam ahead until the end. The truth is that in 1979, the series was permanently withdrawn and we never heard from either of them again.

After the fury

However, the memory materialized its miracle of the time and in 2004 a film was made from it Starsky and Hutch with Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson. Rapper Snoop Dogg played the deranged Huggy Bear.

Life then took them on fewer highways than collectors. Paul Michael Glaser (Starsky) suffered the most. Her wife, Elizabeth, died in 1994 of AIDS (infected by a blood transfusion) and before her, in 1988, and similarly Ariel, their daughter, who had contracted the disease in her belly, and mother, died. her.

David Soul, who passed away today at the age of 80, had fleeting success in the world of music and singing Don’t give up on us (1977), number one on the Billboard 100 list that year and reached number one in the UK. She has also participated in several films and series. He had a long struggle with alcohol and moved from the United States to England.