Britbike forum Forums General discussion The Rod and Tappet Movie vehicles wrecked ‘74

Off and on I look for proof my memory is not totally bogus…
About ‘74, I was deep into ‘56 Chevys, and was finishing a Nomad. The group I was with were all obsessed in the subject. One evening I was watching a B movie on the tube, and I think the movie was called “Rage”. In one scene, some very bad teenagers are harassing a house in a neighborhood, and the Dad looses it! He attacks the car they are in and beats the ‘56 Nomad with a baseball bat. I recall yelling out loud……. Not the Nomad !!!! I have always been on the look out for that movie, wondering where it disappeared into B movie oblivion….. the car was yellow.

I always feel the same when nice cars, trucks, bikes, or boats are destroyed or badly damaged in movies, but I have to believe they were actually just pretty-colored hulk props and not actual nice vehicles...

Sorry this doesn't help you in your search.

"Demolition Derby" was a regular feature on "ABC Wide World of Sports" when I were a lad.

Oh the cars they destroyed on those shows .... Collectibles today if they were still here....

You have probably seen the classic film 'The Italian Job' where E-type Jags, Lamborghini's, Aston Martin etc. are either crushed by bulldozers, thrown off from alpine roads into ravines or otherwise destroyed.

These were all thrilling scenes but the reality was that even back in those days, the producers weren't willing to sacrifice the cars, and mockups were used instead.

I guess the same would apply to 56 Chevy's used in films.

Still in the reminisce mood, and in that same time period. The group all went to see the American Graffiti move, guys and wives, great flick for our generation even though not living in CA where it was staged. Anyhow, near the end of the movie, the grudge race between the Yellow coupe and the Black ‘55 chevy is in progress, slamming gears. The ‘55 gets squirrelly and flips. The scene is fairly quick, and a couple guys even stand up as all the guys in my group yell “It’s an Automatic!!!”… as the car is upside down momentarily. Then we all laughed at the perfect reaction we had, almost as though rehearsed before hand. I may have to sit through that film again for the nostalgia factor.

American Graffiti race scene:

Nice clip, I like this from the Italian Job



the Aston Martin apparently going over the cliff was actually a Lancia mock-up, to save money.

That's probably why they're collectible now

Hi KC, maybe you can find it among these three pages: https://www.imcdb.org/vehicles_make-Chevrolet_model-Bel+Air+Nomad.html

Hey Franko! Cool site, Thanks! looked thru the ‘56 page and not seen but fun place you found. Some of those movie scenes were fairly quick, and the one I remember was excruciatingly long! The Dad beat the crap out of that car….

A tri-five car and truck are on my list of must haves before I die... A nomad would be nice too.

Hey Wade…. Do it sooner than later! The window of opportunity is closing all the time, and it’s very silent! 😀

As a teen in the '60's I had a strong desire to own a '56 Chevy myself, never realized that dream (mostly due to lack of funds at the time) but did come close once or twice.
Some years later my older brother showed up with a '57 Chevy he'd recently purchased. He kept it for about six months and then sold it. When I asked him why, he basically replied that when compared to the quiet ride, stability and reliability of modern cars, older vintage cars can leave much to be desired. There's some truth to that but if that '57 had been mine I'd no doubt still have it today. What that Chevy lacked in technology it more than made up for with loads of character ( we britbike types know all about "loads of character"). But he was satisfied that he'd scratched that itch and was ready to move on.
With regard to "Shoe-Box Chevys" I think the most radicalized & race-bred I've ever seen have always been the "55 Coupes. They just look the part!
Probably the perfect vintage car would be one like "Christine": "Crash me, take a baseball bat or even a sledge hammer to me, I don't care. I'll just go ahead and fix myself ".That's the UP side.
The DOWN side: she was known to have a slight penchant for revenge!

Hi Phil, Yep, totally agreed!! ".. when compared to the quiet ride, stability and reliability of modern cars, older vintage cars can leave much to be desired. There's some truth to that...."

For awhile I was doing '71 Cutlass cars, got deep into them, and the comfort level does become a glaring change when you go back, which I did after some El Caminos. The feeling, sound, smell, are all part of the attaction, ...it takes you back! Just the squeak of the drivers door would make me smile. As you said, us Brit Bike guy have the same understanding of what character is! Here's my 1 man job in 1975, Joliet IL.

I really hated to see this car go over the cliff in Harold and Maude.
https://www.hagerty.com/media/entertainment/harold-and-maude-e-type-hearse-replica/

Funny thing, I just watched a George Lucas documentary about Amerivan Grafritti. The car was a 55, not a 56 and the burning wreck at the end of the race was a hulk left over from the filming of Two Lane Blacktop. He said it took several tries to get it to roll over. The documentary is on you tube, lots of interesting bits of trivia and insights about the film. Enough so that I found it on showtime and watched it last night.

And of course the shot would have been mocked up several times so it was not 1 model but a 1/2 dozen or more till they got the results they wanted to before the actual shoot .

I am fairly sure a lot of the times no actual full sized vehicles are destroyed at all but it makes the film a lot more money if the BS in the blurb says that x number of exotic cars were destroyed .
Most prop shops can do a very realistic fiberglass mock up of almost any vehicle in no time flat and then there are the studio body mock ups for the close ups
I have delivered a lot of 1/2 , 1/3 & 1/4 scale vehicles to film locations
Sitting in the back of the van they look so obviously fake, in the film you would swear they are real

Yes they are
And a lot are actually small scale models shot off small clifs with catepults of one type or another

Apart from the cost of the actual props / vehicles there is also the cost of the clean up
While 3rd world countries might leave them there and make tourist attraction of them most places require every trace to be removed so the scenes are usually filmed in disused quarys mocked up to look like side of the road where the actual driving scenes were shot .
The only thing that is real in a movie is the ticket price and when it comes to TV you are talking about 1% of a movie budget per minute per minute .

Another good film with a real wreck at the end:



No mockups and only one shot at getting it right according to Spielberg. In the final head on shot the drivers door is open as the stunt man had just bailed out.

Thanks for that LINK! Really interesting car, especially if you tend to like wagons.

I loved the look in his eye when he fired up the torch to create that car in the movie.

I had a friend in high school who drove a Cadillac Hearse. He died many years later in a parachute accident. Unfortunately it wasn't a fake accident.

Car chase scene from The Blues Brothers...
one of the great chase/crash moments ever. Cars werent worth anything anyway but what fun!



And to add to the fun here's a link to a FORBES ARTICLE on movies that crashed the most cars

That has to be a world record jump for a Pinto wagon. It left I 794 in Milwaukee Wisconsin by the Summer Fest grounds and landed in downtown Chicago Illinois.

Not particularly realistic, though. No seat belts back then; with a car rolling like that, they'd have been tossed halfway out a window and probably squashed by the rolling car. It's how most people in fatal crashes today die. "Thrown from vehicle; not wearing seat belt ...."

Artistic license applies.

Lannis

Walking away from the crash was a bit of a stretch, just like the obligatory fire and explosion. Up to the point where Indiana Jones's field car ran off the road it seemed quite plausible.
The first car going on ahead to the finish line before Terry flagged them off was a nice touch I took a while to pick up.


I'd largely forgotten about American Graffiti until KC's reminder, but it doesn't seem like 50 years since it was released.

The '55 Chevy styling turned up here a couple of years later as the FC and then FB Holden.

Getting even further off topic, early Holdens were based on Chevs. The original 1948 48/215 and subsequent FJ were a pre-War design which may not have been built as a Chev.

My grandparents had a Fisher bodied 1957 Chev. I think it was a Two-Ten.

We also had a 1926 or 1927 Roadster with a tray back conversion. Fortunately, I never made good on my plans to convert it to a hot rod. It wouldn't have been anywhere near as cool as John Milner's Ford coupe.