In the third-season opener of Miami Vice, Detective Sonny Crockett’s black 1972 Ferrari 365 GTS/4 Daytona Spyder—an important accessory for the character’s cover as a high-end drug dealer and malefactor, and a key component of the series’ aesthetic—is destroyed by a rocket launcher fired by Jeff Fahey’s bayou-dwelling arms dealer. There was a reason for this profligate gesture beyond its utility as a display of ’80s consumerism and action spectacle: the Daytonas used in the show (there were two of them) were replicas, built on the chassis of Corvettes. The story that the show’s executive producer Michael Mann tells is that Enzo Ferrari himself—then nearly ninety—saw the fake Ferraris and was furious, insisting that the show use the real deal and gifting the production with two of the latest model. And so, at the start of the next episode, the Metro-Dade Police Department supplies Crockett with a replacement: a 1986 Testarossa in cocaine white.
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