The White Blazer

James has a fantastic ode to the majesty of Miami Vice's gun battles over on Moistworks today:

What really left me flush was gun play. The mad dance of exit wounds, muzzle flash, spent casings pinging off the warehouse bitumen. No one choreographs this dance in the editor's suite quite like Michael Mann. For Mann, the bullet in flight is an Objet d'Art. Mann loved the MAC-10 too. With its short barrel and protracted magazine, the MAC-10 could introduce bullets into a scene faster and more inaccurately than any other weapon. And with Mann, the mastery was in the bullets that missed as much the ones that found the mark.

The music in Miami Vice was famously sleek and crucial to the show's moods, and James nails a bunch of the iconic songs from the show. But as a kid, I played and replayed one particular track from my copy of Miami Vice II, the sequel to the soundtrack: "Crockett's Theme," by Jan Hammer. More stately and elegant than Hammer's famous title music, "Crockett's Theme" played, a cursory Google search reveals, during many episodes of the show. I particularly remember the song, though, as playing during a climactic night-time shootout in, I don't know, some episode, in which the girl Sonny Crockett loved was killed. The shootout was shot in gorgeous slow motion, complete with Crockett yelling "No!!!" and the episode fading to black.

As a kid, I spent hours in my room, re-enacting this shootout alone, "Crockett's Theme" on endless repeat on my first CD player. For maximum verisimilitude, I used my best water gun, a jet-black plastic Uzi manufactured in the days before fear of hooligans rendered all water guns bright orange or cartoon-shaped. In slow motion I would aim, shoot, dive for cover, shout out to my beloved, take a bullet to the chest, scream "No!!!", all synched perfectly to Jan Hammer's synthesized beats. I must have been around twelve, and (I realize now) weirdly preoccupied with the artful choreography of death scenes.

Sadly, my love of Miami Vice extended past solitary, imagined shootouts in my bedroom; when my dad invited me to accompany him to the Wisconsin Press Club's annual dinner, which he was hosting, I wore a terrible outfit that appears to have been inspired by Miami Vice, with an added dash of Midwestern style:

Circa 1986, with Milwaukee radio personalities Reitman & Mueller

Tragic.

Jan Hammer: "Crockett's Theme"
from Miami Vice II (1986)