Toyota Camry - GET THE FEELING!
Jun 19 '03
The Bottom Line If you buy a Toyota Camry, do not consider the streets your playground.
Viewers switching on to Fox News in Los Angeles the other evening were greeted with yet another car chase in progress. Since OJ took his famous odyssey around the L.A. freeway system several years ago, car chases have been pretty much standard fare on the evening news. The movie HOLLYWOOD HOMICIDE features a car chase in which there are so many competing news helicopters following it that the local chopper reporters are waving to each other and getting in the way of the police helicopter assigned to the chase. Local news personalities love these movie cameos, but last Tuesday evening, only Fox News was following the chase—not high profile enough, I guess—no O.J. or Josh Hartnett--just a 13-year-old minority kid in baggy jeans, a wifebeater T-shirt and baseball cap out joyriding and doing his best to get his fifteen minutes of fame in a stolen Toyota Camry.
Apart from not being famous enough to make CBS, NBC, or ABC coverage, his biggest mistake was his choice of cars--Toyota Camrys are pretty much standard car theft targets in L.A. Parts must be hard to get, or something. Everybody knows somebody whose Toyota Camry was stolen. Someone in my apartment building had hers stolen only a couple of weeks ago. Had he stolen a Hummer or a school bus or at least a white Ford Bronco, his ratings may have fared better. But I digress...
So this kid is joy-riding around his South Central neighborhood, hanging out the window making gang signs and conversing with his acquaintances on the sidewalk, going the wrong way on some of the streets to pass up the traffic, ignoring stop signs and stop lights, at one point somehow managing to sit on the driver's side window to wave at his fans while continuing to keep the car moving (demonstrating the excellent cruise control of the Toyota Camry), reclining the driver's side seat to near horizontal so as to show how laid back he is about all this... And still, only Fox is following this.
Meanwhile, the Fox News people, who clearly had a slow night on their agenda anyway and fond as they are of “reality television” where they don’t have to pay anyone to write or create interesting entertainment, are carrying on a running commentary amongst themselves, remarking on how dangerous this car chase is (hoping, I suppose to boost their own ratings by trying to convince us that this kid’s 35 m.p.h. “chase” is high drama) are forced to observe that there are only two police cars actually involved in the chase, and explain to viewers the new car chase policies of the LAPD not to use the spike chain or a bumping maneuver that used to make car chases so much fun to watch but are all gone now because of safety issues. When one commentator notes that LAPD may, however, use this maneuver in case of a felony committed by the driver, the conversation shifts to speculation about when we may actually hope to see blood. The chopper reporter pointed out several times that the driver was endangering the lives of all in the neighborhood with “a 2,000-pound deadly weapon”, and seemed delighted when, in answer to his dearest wishes, the kid was unable to stop fast enough to avoid rear-ending another car. "Okay!” he crowed gleefully, “That's felony hit-and-run, now!"
The effect of the fairly slow speed rear-end collision was not as satisfying to the news anchors or the viewing public as they by now felt they had a right to expect. Thirty minutes of breathless anticipation, and still no spectacular explosion or chain reaction piling cars upon other cars, and the driver was again on his way with the police doggedly lagging behind. Eventually, after circling the same streets for a good half hour longer with smoke pouring out from under the hood of his now-damaged Toyota Camry, the kid apparently heard from his pals on the sidewalk that none of the bigger networks were coming on board for this caper. Faced with this sad news, he stopped his car, and got out, lay prone in the street with his arms spread and was promptly sat upon by a couple of beefy policemen who cuffed him and took him away.
Now this is where the kid really blew it. If he had followed the example of the Toyota Camry commercial now airing all over television, he had ended his joyride by jumping out of the car to make snow angels on the street, exclaiming, “MY CAR MAKES ME FEEL LIKE THE STREETS ARE MY PLAYGROUND!” he might have shown up on the Eleven O’clock News of the other stations, at least locally. Now, whenever I see that Toyota Camry commercial with the driver jumping his car over hills and fishtailing down the city streets claiming how much fun it is, I’m oddly disappointed that at the end, the driver is not jumped on by beefy policemen who cuff him and take him away as they did the 13-year-old who was, after all, only following his example on Tuesday night.
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Epinions.com ID:
maggiewill
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Location: Santa Monica, California
Reviews written: 3
Trusted by: 2 members
About Me:
writer, editor, screenwriter, animation survivor, ex-ex-patriot, patron of the arts, philanthropist, diva, type O+
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