Americans like our autos like we like our celebrities — sleek and sexy or macho and muscular, but always, always with enough panache to make ’em stand out in a crowd. No wonder stars and cars hold neighboring sweet spots in our hearts and most vivid memories. With convertible season just around the corner, we salute pop culture’s love affair with car-crazy famous folks and iconic rides that hold their own on top TV shows and road-ready films.
There’s nothing like a great car to impress a girl, chase down a bad guy or amp up your cool cred. No wonder Hollywood has long relied on four-wheeled superstars to turbocharge a storyline. We salute some of pop culture’s most notable “TV-ehicles,” their backstories, fun facts and equally famous drivers.
A Ferrari in paradise
For eight seasons, Tom Selleck donned a half-buttoned Hawaiian shirt and drove around Oahu in an open-top Ferrari 308 GTS to play Thomas Sullivan Magnum IV, a Vietnam vet turned private investigator living a luxurious island lifestyle in the Emmy-winning series Magnum , P.I. While the mustachioed Magnum brought plenty of sex appeal to the long-running 1980s series, when he slipped into that red-hot convertible, he smoldered. Producers originally intended to use a Porsche 928 for the series, but the automaker wouldn’t concede to modifications enlarging the sunroof for aerial shots. It was their loss. Having a sexy male lead in the driver’s seat on one of television’s hottest shows was good business for Ferrari — so much so that the Italian car manufacturer gave Selleck a car for his own personal use. “I couldn’t drive that around Hawaii — I would have looked ridiculous,” Selleck admitted. “I ended up sending it back to L.A., and my dad got to drive it.”
Magnum’s own ride suffered countless mishaps — it was stolen, keyed, blown up (a few times) and driven off a cliff. But when the series ended in 1988, all of the surviving Ferraris used in the series were auctioned off. In 2017, one of them — the 1984 308 GTS — sold for $181,500 at auction.
George Barris took TV cars to a whole new level
Sometimes TV cars were intentionally more about kooky than cool. The Munsters (CBS, 1964-66) featured a comically creepy family that parked two tricked-out rides in the drive — both designed by genius car customizer George Barris, who also memorable created vehicles for The Beverly Hillbillies, Batman and Knight Rider. Towering, Frankensteinian Herman (Fred Gwynne) managed to fold himself nicely into the family-sized Koach that was made from three Model T bodies, while vampire Grandpa piloted in the Drag-u-la hot rod that fittingly featured a coffin as its body. Butch Patrick, who played Eddie Munster, said that he wasn’t allowed to drive either until he returned to Universal Studios as an adult and got behind the wheel of the Koach — not realizing that the tires had very little air pressure and no screws holding them to the beam. “I goosed it, and the back two tires came off,” he laughed.
For Hillbillies’ backwoods-gone-Beverly-Hills Clampett clan (CBS, 1962-71), Barris was asked to design a vehicle that could hold the entire batch of bumpkins, plus their stuff. He found it in a 1921 Oldsmobile from which the rear half of the body had already been removed to create a kind of truck — a common modification for rural drivers at the time. Barris added a rear platform with a lady-friendly bench seat so Granny, Elly May and beloved bloodhound Duke enjoyed an unobstructed view. The Clampett car now resides at the Ralph Foster Museum on the campus of College of the Ozarks in Point Lookout, Mo.
But the most famous vehicle in all of TV and filmdom’s history is the ever-evolving Batmobile. For the ABC TV series Batman (1966-68), Barris bought a discarded 1955 Ford Lincoln Futura concept car for one dollar and spent about $15,000 to equip it with a Batphone, internal mounted rockets and other imaginative crime-fighting gadgets for the Dynamic Duo . The car paid Barris back handsomely: He sold the original Batmobile in 2013 for $4.6 million.
Holy profit, Batman!
