head-on collision: old car vs new

[jamespowers]

Very true, and some day when I have kids and grandkids, I want stories to tell them about the crazy stuff I did. All my elders have them, I sure as heck want 'em, too!

I have plenty to tell already.

 

[jamespowers]

I don't understand what you are trying to say....please clarify.

He is saying that in Fall Guy and Dukes of Hazzard, those cars were only twenty years old and not the same status car at the time. There were plenty of them around---enough for them to mess up 300 in the filming of Dukes of Hazard.

 

[jamespowers]

Nice.... life insurance may cover the bills, but can't cover a lifetime of experiences spent with your family. Good luck in your death-trap........

Life is a thing you don't walk away from alive. How many people just drop dead and never see thier children as it is? Clarke Gable never saw his son. He died before he was even born. Tragedies happen every day to innocent people with even adding traffic accidents.
I'll take my deathtrap over this one:

 

[jamespowers]

Seems to me I remember something back in the 90s when the big push was being made for mandatory seat belt laws about the insurance industry leading the charge -- promising that such laws would lead to lower premiums, lower medical costs, and better service all around. The lobbyists had a field day with that whole deal.

Well, we're twenty years on. We're still waiting for the lower premiums, lower medical costs, and better service all around. If I didn't know better I'd swear that the whole movement had less to do with Aunt Sammy wanting to keep us all safe and secure than with protecting the interests of a certain rodentine pack in Hartford.

Interesting what campaign contributions can buy eh?

 

[J.W.]

I don't understand what you are trying to say....please clarify.

Quite simlpe: people don't have deep-running feelings for fairly new cars. If the car is older - and rarer - that changes because they start to be more valuable, especially for collectors. Let's take The Fall Guy's GMC Sierra as an example: they crashed dozens of them and I don't think people complained. It was a current production car. If you made a movie today and crashed a 1983 Sierra, quite a few people would say "How can they do that to the car!?" The 1960 Pontiac mentioned wasn't old enough in the early 80ies, the same is true for the Duke's chargers.
Seeing really old cars destroyed in movies is always sad and in a way, it's a bit like destroying a cultural heirloom.

 

[cklos]

Thanks, but I was asking him, not you.

He is saying that in Fall Guy and Dukes of Hazzard, those cars were only twenty years old and not the same status car at the time. There were plenty of them around---enough for them to mess up 300 in the filming of Dukes of Hazard.

 

[AtomicEraTom]

You're also over twice my age

I have plenty to tell already.

 

[cklos]

Thanks for the clarification. :eusa_clap

Quite simlpe: people don't have deep-running feelings for fairly new cars. If the car is older - and rarer - that changes because they start to be more valuable, especially for collectors. Let's take The Fall Guy's GMC Sierra as an example: they crashed dozens of them and I don't think people complained. It was a current production car. If you made a movie today and crashed a 1983 Sierra, quite a few people would say "How can they do that to the car!?" The 1960 Pontiac mentioned wasn't old enough in the early 80ies, the same is true for the Duke's chargers.
Seeing really old cars destroyed in movies is always sad and in a way, it's a bit like destroying a cultural heirloom.

 

[Edward]

Quite simlpe: people don't have deep-running feelings for fairly new cars. If the car is older - and rarer - that changes because they start to be more valuable, especially for collectors. Let's take The Fall Guy's GMC Sierra as an example: they crashed dozens of them and I don't think people complained. It was a current production car. If you made a movie today and crashed a 1983 Sierra, quite a few people would say "How can they do that to the car!?" The 1960 Pontiac mentioned wasn't old enough in the early 80ies, the same is true for the Duke's chargers.
Seeing really old cars destroyed in movies is always sad and in a way, it's a bit like destroying a cultural heirloom.

I agree. Distance from time of manufacture plus rarity will be the two big factors. I remember in the late Seventies / Early Eighties when the Austin Maxi was considered to be an nasty old clunker, and nobody lost any sleep over the idea of one getting trashed. There was a time when the likes of a P Series Rover would have been considered perfect material for the demolition derby circuit. Nowadays, they're all collectible, and somebody would be gutted to see them smashed. Happens in all sorts - in the Seventies, original demob suits were just "old clothes", regularly sliced up by young punks; original fifties clothes the people would all but kill for now I hear stories of being treated as disposable, they were so plentiful and cheap. It's the way of things - to put it another way, you don't know what you got til it's (almost) gone.

 

[LizzieMaine]

What they ought to do is follow the example of how it was done in silent comedies -- rig up a trick "special effects" car using junk parts, and use it over and over again. Laurel and Hardy didn't wreck dozens of different Model T's over the years, it was always the same one, specially built in the Hal Roach Studios prop department. Buster Keaton used to do something similar -- his entire film "The Navigator" was based on his chance discovery that a decomissioned and unseaworthy ocean liner was about to be scrapped. He bought it for the scrap-metal price, slapped a fresh coat of paint on it, and could do anything he wanted with it, after which time it went to the scrapyard, where it was already heading anyway. And when he dropped a locomotive off a burning bridge in Oregon in "The General," it was a bridge that his own propmen built, and a dummy locomotive assembled from a junk chassis, rusty parts, and some paint. They did just enough to it to get it to move, and no rare artifact was actually destroyed.

 

[Rathdown]

Buster Keaton used to do something similar -- when he dropped a locomotive off a burning bridge in Oregon in "The General," it was a bridge that his own propmen built, and a dummy locomotive assembled from a junk chassis, rusty parts, and some paint. They did just enough to it to get it to move, and no rare artifact was actually destroyed.

I'm not questioning the veracity of your posting, but I would appreciate it if you could cite the source of your information. Thanks!

 

[J.W.]

The wonders of modern computer technology might make it possible, that no real cars need to be "killed off" any more. If they blow up a vintage car, they can do it in photoshop.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'm not questioning the veracity of your posting, but I would appreciate it if you could cite the source of your information. Thanks!

Posting from memory -- I'm not a Keaton specialist, but given his known reverence for machinery I'd be surprised if he destroyed a perfectly functional antique locomotive. It might have been a switch-engine or some other type of machine that had been modified to look passably Civil War-vintage from a distance.

(Addendum) -- According to this specialist on the real-life raid that served as the basis for The General, the locomotive Buster dropped into Culp Creek was an 1890's-vintage lumber hauler, suitably modified to pass for Civil War vintage. Which means it was only about thirty years old when it was sacrificed, and not especially rare or antique.

Most of the other rail stock in the film, according to Keaton biographer Marion Meade, was mocked up from junked Los Angeles trolley cars. Meade confirms, on page 165, that Keaton's crew did indeed build the bridge across the Creek, expressly for the purpose of destroying it in the film.

 

[cklos]

It doesn't seem she has any....only memories of a happier, simpler past. I wish I could turn the clock back too

I'm not questioning the veracity of your posting, but I would appreciate it if you could cite the source of your information. Thanks!

 

[cklos]

Sorry I offended you Lizzie, just speaking my mind....(at present)...but it does make things more interesting than brown-nosing, right?

 

[LizzieMaine]

We find it more interesting when people actually contribute meaningful content to the Lounge. The members who stay around here for any length of time generally do so -- the smirking pot-stirrers generally get bored when we ignore them, and move on. Which one will you be?

 

[cklos]

Define meaningful content to me.....comments that reinforce your views and beliefs, or a challenging voice that questions them?

 

[Pompidou]

For making a movie where a car is destroyed, any sort of reproduction or computer mockup would do, to save vintage stock if the producer so cared, but for something in the name of science, like the crash test that started the thread, only authentic will do. My views on ownership rights vs preservation still haven't changed from favoring the right of the owner to do as s/he pleases despite other concerns. Me personally, I don't buy antiques to preserve, but because I want to use them or show them off, but I'd never destroy them. A deck of PBR 100th anniversary and WW2 playing cards w/ pinup model design is really my only example, but I play them without hesitation. Used to have vintage sunglasses from the 1910s, but they broke from use. I value use over preservation.

 

[Stanley Doble]

It is normal for movie directors to substitute a cheap, fake, or worthless car, building etc when one needs to be destroyed. Partly for cost reasons. But also because they always or almost always, have several cars on hand in case they need to do multiple takes. In the latest Green Lantern film they had 8 or 9 mid sixties Chryslers rebuilt into special cars. Most of them were refugees from a junk yard and would not have stood inspection from 20 feet away but were good enough for filming from a distance.

In one movie from the 40s the hero drove a brand new 1948 Lincoln Continental convertible. At the end of the picture it went over a cliff in a fiery crash. But if you look close, the crash car was a 1941 Ford coupe with the roof sawed off and a Continental tire stuck on the back.

 

[Edward]

What they ought to do is follow the example of how it was done in silent comedies -- rig up a trick "special effects" car using junk parts, and use it over and over again. Laurel and Hardy didn't wreck dozens of different Model T's over the years, it was always the same one, specially built in the Hal Roach Studios prop department. Buster Keaton used to do something similar -- his entire film "The Navigator" was based on his chance discovery that a decomissioned and unseaworthy ocean liner was about to be scrapped. He bought it for the scrap-metal price, slapped a fresh coat of paint on it, and could do anything he wanted with it, after which time it went to the scrapyard, where it was already heading anyway. And when he dropped a locomotive off a burning bridge in Oregon in "The General," it was a bridge that his own propmen built, and a dummy locomotive assembled from a junk chassis, rusty parts, and some paint. They did just enough to it to get it to move, and no rare artifact was actually destroyed.

Woldn't surprise me if it was simply cheaper to trash the real thing by the modern era. Of course, I'm sure most of the cars trashed aren't really roadworthy (or even legal, sometimes), though if they are rare it could still be a waste of valuable spares.

The wonders of modern computer technology might make it possible, that no real cars need to be "killed off" any more. If they blow up a vintage car, they can do it in photoshop.

True. And no doubt some of us will then only turn and whine on about them using "computer fakes" instead of "real" vintage cars...

It is normal for movie directors to substitute a cheap, fake, or worthless car, building etc when one needs to be destroyed. Partly for cost reasons. But also because they always or almost always, have several cars on hand in case they need to do multiple takes. In the latest Green Lantern film they had 8 or 9 mid sixties Chryslers rebuilt into special cars. Most of them were refugees from a junk yard and would not have stood inspection from 20 feet away but were good enough for filming from a distance.

In one movie from the 40s the hero drove a brand new 1948 Lincoln Continental convertible. At the end of the picture it went over a cliff in a fiery crash. But if you look close, the crash car was a 1941 Ford coupe with the roof sawed off and a Continental tire stuck on the back.

I'm sure I remember another film from the Sixties where (very obviously) a 1600 Ghia was thrown off a cliff in place of a Beetle, the only thing those tow cars having remotely in common was their colour... lol