His father was a doctor who’d played in clubs during his time in medical school, and his mother was one of the best-known singers on the the Czech jazz scene. Hammer came from Prague, and both of his parents were musicians. Jan Hammer was near 40 when he hit #1, and he was probably the baldest man on MTV at the time. Everything syncs up with Phil Collins’ “In The Air Tonight,” and the feeling of anticipation gives the scene a dreamlike quality. That kind of stuff was obsolete.” In a famous scene from the 1984 Miami Vice pilot, Johnson and Thomas’ Crocket and Tubbs drive through Miami at night. In the oral history I Want My MTV, Mann says that he was watching a lot of MTV at the time and that “MTV influenced editing - now, we were cutting picture to music… You didn’t need to bring an audience through so much clunky, conventional exposition of the story. He dictated that earth tones should almost never appear, and he made Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, his two lead detectives, look like pop stars, dressing them in Ray-Bans and Armani jackets and throwing them in Ferraris that no cop could afford. Mann, who’d already directed the movies Thief and The Keep, made sure to keep everything on the show as bright and artificial as possible. There’s a legend that Miami Vice began when NBC executive Brandon Tartikoff wrote a two-word phrase down on a slip of paper: “MTV cops.” Michael Mann, the executive producer and showrunner of Miami Vice, has disputed that story, but “MTV cops” is still pretty much the aesthetic of the show. It yanks you right out of whatever stupor you’re in and throws you headlong into a place that’s full of sex and money and things that go fast. Together, it feels overwhelming, disorienting, almost assaultive. The music matches the images: Drum-machine thunder, staccato Fairlight bloops, screaming electric-guitar wheedles. It’s a bracing burst of supremely mid-’80s glamor. Virtually everything else in the Miami Vice intro screams that same time and place - the bikinis, the speedboats, the spiral sculpture, the grilles of expensive cars.
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