I Couldn’t Help Myself: Cold Start

Over the past couple days, the internet has been doing one of the things it does best, showing the entire population the same pool of things so that if one thing somehow catches people’s attention, it snowballs and becomes a fixture, if only for a moment, on the human collective consciousness. That’s currently happening now – perhaps actually winding down at this point – with a fascination with a young woman and her emphatic concept known now as hawk tuah. It was so pervasive that I found myself helpless to fight trying to come up with an automotive tie-in, which you see up above there.

If, somehow, you’re not familiar with the hawk tuah phenomenon, then first let me congratulate you from waking up from your coma, which I’m sure was no picnic, and I suppose I can just show you the original source.

Here’s the video clip that started it all, simply a woman being asked a question, and answering with a vigorous honesty and an undeniable joie de vivre: 

Yes, yes, sage advice for us all. Really, in many ways, this feels like a refreshingly simple and fun thing to go viral, just someone with an exuberant way of expressing herself and everyone was kind of strangely enthralled.

Anyway, if you don’t get the automotive version up there, I’m happy to explain: that’s a Studebaker Hawk, so, the Hawk with the TUAH license plate I hoped would convey the hawk-tuah reference. And, as a bonus, it’s nice to get people thinking about the Studebaker Hawk!

I like Hawks; they’re great-looking cars that had available superchargers and 275 horsepower way back in the 1950s. But I also have a sort of complicated feeling about them, because, as cool as they look, they’re also an example, I think, of how a design can get progressively ruined over time and everyone feeling an urge to needlessly “update” it and add crap.

See, the basic Hawk design started out as the Studebaker Starliner in 1953, a design penned by Bob Bourke, working under legendary industrial designer Raymond Loewy’s team. The car they came up with was, by 1950s standards especially, incredibly sleek and understated and elegant. Remember, 1950s American car design wasn’t really known for elegance or grace; this was an era when designers like Harley Earl would specify the amount of chrome trim he wanted to see on a car in terms of pounds. As in “add 100 more pounds of chrome on that.”

Here, look at this progression of the basic design from its introduction in 1953 (1954 one shown here, but it was basically the same) to the 1957 Hawk:

All these cars are based on the same fundamental body design, but things were added and changed over the years; look how lean and svelte that Starliner was at the beginning, and then you see how the urge to add more chrome, a bigger grille, side trim and so on crept in, until the Hawk design which added a huge central grille and hood bulges and tacked-on indicator light pods on the front fenders and, of course, huge tailfins. They just couldn’t help themselves.

Much like how the Hawk Tuah woman can’t help herself from spitting on that thing, which is also why Matt suggested we add one more automotive Hawk Tuah image:

You’re welcome.