From barking to f#ck, you’ve come a long way, babe

It was 48 years ago today, April 30, 1975, when our two gorgeous, sexy guys made their first on-screen appearance in the premiere of the Starsky & Hutch pilot. And what an appearance it was!

From our introduction to Starsky desperately wanting Hutch to share his daily danish and coffee (or, you know, just desperately wanting Hutch), to Hutch’s teeny-tiny blue gym shorts and his not so teeny-tiny censored, this “action-adventure/crime-drama/eye-candyfest/love story between two men” instantly captivated us, and its characters took up permanent residence in our hearts.

In a scene towards the end of the 1-hour, 11-minute movie’s runtime, a black-and-white squad car pulls over our handsome heroes as they attempt to follow a suspect through the paper-littered (in real life, old scripts scattered by the prop dept) streets of Bay City, CA, causing Hutch to exclaim, “I don’t barking believe it!”

Now, we all know that “barking” was a lame stand-in for “fucking,” because due to the FCC’s ridiculous censorship rules back then, no one could say the F-Word on broadcast TV in 1975 (or in 2023 either, if you can fucking believe it).

Fortunately for us, we can revel in the many occurrences of the F-Word on the blooper reel, so we have proof that, contrary to what TV would have us believe, people cursed in real life.

And while hearing someone say a curse word in the real world somehow didn’t turn any of us into permanently depraved degenerates, apparently that would happen if the words came out of the teevee. Don’t ask me why.

And four disco-and-punk-rock years later (that would be 1979), they STILL couldn’t say the F-Word on TV. But censorship never stopped our big, bulgy boys before (well, other than the lame AF “barking”), and so, in a final glorious farewell to the fans, we get to see (if not hear) Hutch uttering a big ol’ “Fuck!” on-screen.

It’s canon, y’all!

Also canon is Starsky & Hutch ending up in bed together. And wet. But there was totally no intended sub-textual meaning to that scene whatsoever, so get your filthy minds out of the gutter, ya perverts!