It was Candide's grating mentor Pangloss who opined that our noses are shaped as they are so as to better accommodate our eyeglasses. If Voltaire had been writing American cop shows in the 1970s instead of French social satire in the 1750s, Inspector Pangloss would have put it this way: Car hoods are shaped as they are so as to better accommodate T.J. Hooker.
The sight of William Shatner's stunt double clinging persistently to the hood of a Gran Torino or Chevelle or other appropriately gargantuan American car of the day was a staple of 1970s television viewing — it was such a cliche that Saturday Night Live even got Shatner to parody it a decade later . But even those of us who don't read police reports every day know that it's not often you see someone desperately dangling off of a moving car while a crime is in progress.
So it came as a bit of a shock to read the Ingleside police bulletin, which documented this straight-out-of-T.J. Hooker instance:
