The hit 90s television show Baywatch is getting a reboot. While cars weren’t typically an integral part of the story, they still played a key part in defining the show’s the perpetually sunny beachscape. It was announced yesterday that Toyota has signed on as the reboot’s automotive sponsor, a callback to the original series.
Baywatch struck many automotive partnerships during its 11-season run, but the pilot episode featured a D21 Nissan Hardbody. The name could not have been more appropriate, since Baywatch was mainly an excuse to showcase a bunch of human hardbodies as well. The pilot also had a GMC S-15.
Dodge eventually won the Season 1 deal with a Dakota, but Baywatch was famously canceled by NBC after its first season. It was saved by star David Hasselhoff, who helped ink a first-run syndication deal as executive producer. Toyotas were used as a substitute before Nissan signed on as an official sponsor, bringing back the D21 Hardbody.
From Seasons 3-5, Toyota stepped in to take the starring role. The definitive lifeguard truck was a VZN110 XtraCab V6 4WD outfitted with emergency lights, rescue cans, and the obligatory surfboard. This was widely regarded the peak era of Baywatch, and as much as we’d like to credit Toyota for the show’s popularity, something tells us it had more to do with the Season 3 introduction of Pamela Anderson.
With popularity soaring, producers got greedy. They developed a spinoff, Baywatch Nights, in which Hasselhoff’s character moonlighted as a private investigator driving an Acura NSX. The clip above from Baywatch Season 6 was meant to introduce the new show. Jim Rockford had his Firebird, Thomas Magnum had his Ferrari 308, so it was only fitting that Mitch Buchannon drove the hottest sports car of the 90s, the Acura NSX.
The spinoff’s first season followed fairly run-of-the-mill 90s detective show stories. but it never took off like the o.g. Baywatch. In a poorly devised attempt to save it, in Season 2 writers took a page from the hugely popular X-Files and delved into nonsensical supernatural plotlines with Hasselhoff encountering vampires, sea monsters, and aliens. It was canceled after two seasons.
Back to Baywatch proper, from Seasons 6-10, Ford took over as the automotive sponsor and the official lifeguard truck became the Ranger. However, ratings were on a downward slide as the world entered a new decade and a new century. For the eleventh season, which began in October 2000, the setting moved to Hawaii. Nissan returned as the main sponsor.
The D22 Frontier and WD22 Xterra became the official lifeguard rigs, but it was too little, too late. Season 11 would be Baywatch‘s last. To be fair, eleven years was an amazing run for a show that was, frankly, terrible. But it achieved international fame and defined pop culture for a pre-social media world, leading many overseas viewers to believe that Los Angeles was some kind of melanoma-free paradise where everyone was smoking hot and just hung out by the ocean all day.
The reboot with Toyota makes a lot of sense, and not just because they were there during the golden years. Of course that association did help Toyota became the definitive Los Angeles lifeguard truck, and Lindberg even made a 1/20 scale model of it. But in real life, LA County beaches actually use Toyota trucks as lifeguard vehicles to help patrol their 72 miles of coastline.
They have a fleet of 65 vehicles, with 45 Tacomas used for quick-response rescues and beach patrols. An additional 18 Tundras are used for heavy-duty jobs like towing rescue boats or launching jet skis. Sequoias are the rarest of the bunch, numbering only two, driven by Battalion Chiefs and serving as mobile command units during major disasters.
Sadly, unlike the trucks in the show, these are no longer yellow. While Baywatch did portray the Toyota SR5s accurately with their yellow paint jobs, those are no longer in use. The LA County Lifeguards are a division of the LA County Fire Department, and in 2015 the entire fleet was transitioned to red to bring them more in line with the rest of the fire department.
The Baywatch reboot will air later this year but an exact date has not been announced.
Images: Baywatch, IMCDB
