It’s a couple story. At the end of the 19th century, the cranks that began to move the cinema machines and those that started the car engines began to turn almost simultaneously. From then on, both cinema and automobile have lived a long love story. And it would be quite stupid to think that the role of the car in the cinema is reduced to a mere prop. Actually, in many movies he is a real protagonist.
The Americans Bob Kane and Bill Finger, creators of Batman in 1939, integrated their comic character into a mechanical universe of vehicles, from airplanes to helicopters to boats and, of course, cars. These “bat-vehicles” have been an essential part of the life of the “Bat Man”. And they have varied over the years, but in our history we get behind the wheel of a very special one, the Batmobile, used in the 1966 television series.
And it is that, in reality, the Batmobile as such does not accompany Batman at the beginning of its existence. He then used a red car of unknown make. The name of Batmobile (Batmobile in English) appears later, when he uses a night blue car with red decorations and a front inspired by the protagonist’s mask. In the year 1943, in a first series of fifteen short films produced by Columbia Pictures, which are shown in theaters, a black Cadillac Series 75 convertible appears, driven by Alfred Thadeus Crane Pennyworth, butler and chauffeur of Bruce Wayne, the man who hides behind Batman.
In the continuation of this series, “Batman and Robin”, another fifteen episodes screened in 1949, they get behind the wheel of a Mercury Eight, an unmodified, completely stock convertible.
And there is even a curious Batmobile, in the sixties, three years before the premiere of Batman. Forrest Robinson of New Hampshire built a fantastic version from a 1956 Oldsmobile Rocket 88. This car never actually appeared on TV or in the movies as it would be used by All Star Dairy Products solely to promote their “Batman” ice cream line.
New image
In 1964 the character of Kane and Finger does not live his best moment, and even between them, the parents of the creature, the relations are terrible. His comics are not selling well and Batman is about to disappear. The editor Julius Schwarth is in charge of the resurrection of the character, looking for a different style of stories, and for this he hires the cartoonist Carmine Infantino who gives another air to both the character and the Batmobile.
For the year 1966, Twentieth Century Fox launched its project of bringing the transformed batman to the small screen. The production company commissions a famous Hollywood coachbuilder, Dean Jeffries, one of the creators of Carroll Shelby’s Cobra (and some vehicles for movies), to build a Batmobile for the new television series. Jeffries starts from a 1959 Cadillac. But the producers want to move up the shooting and the car is not ready. So they turn to George Barris, a specialist in creating cars for movies, known as “The King of Kustom”, with a “K”.
Barris ‘Kustom’
Barris was born in Chicago to a family of Greek immigrants and moved to California to live with his uncle after his mother died when he was still a child. From a very young age, his love of automobiles led him to carry out restorations and transformations. He then moved to Los Angeles in 1944, aged 18, and opened his first store in the city of Bell. His brother Sam, after returning from military service, joined him in 1945 and both brothers moved to a larger store on Compton Avenue in Los Angeles a year later. An even larger location, in Bell, was kept open from 1949 to 1950, followed by the store in nearby Lynwood. Sam left the business in the late 1950s, and Barris made the last move in 1961. His wife, Shirley, found the location of the store, now called Barris Kustom City, at 10811 Riverside Drive in the San Fernando Valley.
From the beginning, Barris’s works are recognized for their bold and eye-catching designs, and he gets jobs customizing cars for Hollywood movies and high-profile clients, including Frank Sinatra, or Elvis Presley, among others. And he’s also making a big name for himself in Hot Rod culture.
When Twentieth Century Fox turns to Barris, he accepts the assignment because he has the solution to the problem in mind. He has a 1955 Lincoln prototype in the garage, a unique example baptized “Futura”, built by the Italian coachbuilder Ghia.
A soldier, a dancer, a bullfighter…
This car had already had a starring role in a movie, a 1959 romantic comedy entitled “It Started with a kiss” starring Glenn Ford and Debbie Reynolds. Because the original white color did not film well, the car was painted bright red. The car was the crux of the plot: Reynolds’ character (Maggie, the attractive dancer wife of Joe, a Korean War veteran, played by Ford) wins it in a raffle in New York. And she takes the Lincoln Futura to Spain, her husband’s new destination. The car causes a sensation, both on and off the military base, and even attracts a famous bullfighter (played by Uruguayan Gustavo Rojo), who tries to seduce Maggie. Finally, after a series of problems ranging from sentimental to financial, the marriage is reconciled and it will be precisely the bullfighter who buys (in fiction) the spectacular prototype. After filming, the car is cornered in a warehouse.
Barry’s transformation
Barris dusts off the Lincoln Futura he bought from Ford for a dollar. The Ghia prototype had a cabin with a double windshield and a rear window inspired by aircraft, as well as the typical large fins of American cars of the late fifties that, by the mid-sixties, had already been forgotten by the manufacturers. . So the look of the car, despite its name, was already somewhat old-fashioned.
But what Barris was worried about was having his Batmobile ready in three weeks, the deadline he had been given. So it removes the red paint, the chrome and the plexiglass that makes up the roof, but retains the characteristic double dome-type windshield. Then he widens the wheel arches, changes the tires and extends the rear wings to the doors while they take on the shapes of bat wings at their tips. The original two-spoke steering wheel is replaced by a three-spoke one, from a 1958 Ford Edsel, with the top cut off but the Futura’s speedometer remained in the center of this steering wheel.
A large nozzle appears on the back, like the one on the 1963 Chrysler Turbine Car, as if to imply that the Batmobile was powered by a turbine, when in fact it was a Lincoln V8 engine with 335 hp. This engine gave heating problems during filming and was replaced by one from a Ford Galaxie.
From there, an endless and unimaginable series of accessories were incorporated, for the time or even for today. The «Emergency Bat-turn Lever, which deployed parachutes; the Mobile Bat-computer, a computer with voice recognition, in the trunk; a remote control to open the doors remotely; Bat-ray headlights; the Bat-photoscope, capable of sifting through the files of the criminals of Gotham City, through a server installed in the secret Bat-garage; an automatic tire inflation device; three rocket launchers located on the trunk lid, a cable cutter that came out of the front or a hook that allowed the Batmobile to be lifted up the walls…
George Barry
Once the bodywork was done and the accessories installed, the Barris team painted the car in black and the ends of parts of the bodywork in orange. Also the upholstery of the two seats used this color combination.
By the way, the Batmobile has a plural number plate or plates. The most viewed license plate was “2F-3567”, on a black license plate “Gotham 1966”. The registration number doesn’t have any special meaning, though, some fans have pointed out that as a hexadecimal color code, “2F3567”, a kind of Batman blue. Other plates were seen on the car, such as “TP-6597” and “BAT 1”.
In October 1966, Barris registered the Batmobile design under patent number 205,998, with the US Patent Office.
George Barris, who also conceived other famous screen models like the Monster Koach and the Drag-U-La from the 1960s television series The Munsters, or KITT, the Fantastic Rider from the 1980s, retained ownership of the Batmobile. from 1966, until it would be auctioned -for 4.2 million euros- three years before his death in 2015. Without a doubt, that Lincoln Futura has a movie history.
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