Antique & Classic Cars Blog

It’s easy to fool the eye with a camera. Toy guns, fake armor, half-cars sitting on flat beds to film actors, gaffer tape holding things on, etc., are commonplace and seldom noticeable. Movie cars–selectively shot, usually moving, cleaned up in post–just don’t need to be that nice. Where a car is featured, the studios will have several to drive, a few to wreck if necessary, and then one or more “picture cars,” which are promotional, kept very nice, and used to pimp the production.

Amidst all the no-dollars-spared hot rods, customs, and restored stock eye-morsels at the World of Wheels, the Mach 5 from the new film looked weak. This presumably was a picture car, one built for display only. Fans who grew up watching the original Speed Racer from the 1960s–which admittedly was from a 2-dimensional cartoon–couldn’t help but be disappointed. The drawn car had flowing lines, sweeping curves, and an interior akin to those of its real-life sports counterparts of the time.

The movie car looked just like what it was–a one-off fiberglass body plopped onto a late-model Corvette. It appears they even kept the Vette windshield, which looked about as classic as, well, a late-model Vette. The interior is busy, packed with air-conditioning vents and other modern features that look neither classic nor cinematic. And the lines just didn’t hold up when the car’s sitting still and you can walk around it like a drill sergeant during basic-training inspections.

There’s no blaming the builders. When crunch time comes, Hollywood car builders work as hard as anyone on the planet, meeting impossible demands on impossible timeframes with every job they take. They can make cars look like anything and do anything, keeping in mind the health and safety of the stunt personnel who climb in and make the money footage possible. The disappointment viewing a car like that up close is just the nature of the beast. A Mach 5 that satisfies the middle-aged kids who grew up with the Trans-Luxe cartoon would need to be manufactured by a top-notch custom coachbuilder on a budget of . . . unlimited. It would have hand-beaten panels, custom everything, gauges and dash and wheel and seats to rival the fastest, sexiest Ferraris and Aston Martins and Jaguars of the day. (I would have started with an E-type Jaguar, not a Vette.) Just building a one-off, polished, period-looking engine would probably run half a million bucks.

When studios are paying human stars 5, 10, 20 million dollars a picture, they’re not investing in hand-shaped aluminum-bodied one-off racers that will win at Pebble Beach and make your jaw fall on the ground and shatter when you see them. Turn off the camera and lights, send the cinematographer and editor home and push a movie car into the middle of a car show and your surprise will be just like seeing a big name actor in person. “Hmm. I thought he’d be taller.”

The metal bodies Chip Foose (P32) and Old Skool Kustoms (chopped ’36 Pontiac 3-window) displayed struck a lot closer to my idea of beautiful coachwork–but then, these are cars built to be seen up close in real life.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 2:43 pm and is filed under Car stories, Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.