They went thataway

TV fuzz were still in dress blues or suits and ties when the open-collar, leather-jacketed studs Starsky and Hutch hit the scene in 1975. Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul’s streetwise cops -- tough yet funny, smooth yet fearless -- immediately caught on with young viewers.

Will kids latch on to it now? “Starsky & Hutch -- The Complete First Season” arrived on DVD this week.

Energized with Lalo Schifrin’s wakka-wakka theme and wild car chases in the Red Tomato, “Starsky & Hutch” may have been bloodlessly violent fluff, but it was a landmark in tapping youth culture cool. And it set the stage for further bellwethers of crime-fighting hipness such as “Miami Vice” -- executive-produced, incidentally, by onetime “Starsky” writer Michael Mann.

-- Robert Abele