![]() Movie cars come in two forms: halo machines and everything else. But that left a question: what the hell happened to the actual screen-used car? You can see the rolling cart separate from the body shell as the rig explodes and careens into the water. ![]() The car doesn’t see much screen time until the moment that T-bird’s time runs out on Earth, at which point a prop rig that had a fiberglass shell of the Thunderbird and enough pyrotechnics on it to disguise that fact is blown up. In the movie, the Thunderbird was a supercharged street machine, with a blower through the hood, chrome steel buckshot mags, yellow neon underglow, a chromed pushbar, shaved door handles with electric poppers, and funky custom side mirrors that would be more at-home on a Porsche 944. The 1973 model was a one-year-only body, with the new nose that sported the government-mandated 5-MPH bumper, a new eggcrate grille, opera windows, and either the 429 or 460 cubic inch engines…which could still be ordered to run on leaded fuel. Outside of the Lincoln grille and the hideaway headlights, there was little left to tell the difference between the two titanic personal luxury boats. ![]() The Thunderbird, in its biggest stage, was basically a slightly discounted Lincoln Mark IV at this point. The pairing of David Patrick Kelley’s take on T-Bird’s completely unhinged character against the always-night, always-raining Detroit grime scene and the blood-red, supercharged luxury street brawler that carried T-Bird, Skank, Tin Tin and Funboy around couldn’t have fit better. It couldn’t have been more than a week to the day I’m writing this that I was discussing movie cars with a friend, and I brought up one of my favorite on-screen film machines: the 1973 Ford Thunderbird driven by the cranked-out high-level hood “T-Bird” in 1994’s “The Crow”.
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