When I was about 10 years old my dad introduced me to the one of the most important car movies and movie cars ever The white Dodge Challenger from vanishing point. so naturally I’m very excited about this car today, I am Kowalski The vanishing point challengers from the original movie, from the 1970s movie didn’t survive as far as anybody knows, there’s no record of one… Whoa that’s some stiff breaking, ok… Jesus Christ What was I saying… The cars from the first film, There’s a lot of controversy on what happened to them there were five cars used to make the film Four of them were 444 speeds and one was a 383 automatic We have a reliable source that was at a salvage auction in Los Angeles in 1971, those five cars were sold for scrap Every single one of them If one did survive nobody knows where it is.
There’s no way to trace it there’s no way to prove that it still exists so the only way that you’ll ever experience a screen-used Dodge Challenger from the legendary vanishing point… is to go to the 1996 TV remake, and that’s exactly what this car is Well the second movie was made for TV. It wasn’t a big screen… Film, whereas the first one was intended to be was a b-grade movie. It’s the maximum trip at maximum speed It’s developed a cult following That still exists and it’s quite strong the second movie is Being made for TV. It’s not quite up to speed you might say with the original but it’s still got the same basic storyline. It’s got the same car, the guy’s got the same name, it’s in the desert That’s where the similarities end.
A lot of guys say… oh I don’t like the second movie because it’s not like the first it wasn’t meant to be like the first They wanted something that would relate to the current situation It’s not just some hammering sound track you know with some guy blasting through the desert When I watch death Proof and those girls freaked out about finding a vanishing point challenger Vanshing Point, mate that’s a fucking classic! I Know exactly what that is. If you see a vanishing point challenger And there’s some way that you can get in the driver’s seat YOU DO IT!! this shit is off the fucking hook! They destroyed it, but I understand exactly what those characters were going through. You see one, you’ve got a drive it Well the movie was all about the car.
Not that the actors were not more important They’re a great thing and you know you can send them a Christmas card The second movie they used five cars as they did in the first These cars came from the film when they finished filming it so We picked them up and restored one of them and the rest of them, we just left them dirty like they came number three, the one behind me, was a a backup stunt car that was used in the tunnel jump scene it still has all the Awful lot dirt on it. We have never done anything did at all. Haven’t heard it run 20 years Well the road grime was basically a combination of potting soil and coffee that was sprayed on the car And then they’d spray it with hairspray to keep it in place And then we couldn’t hardly get that crap off of them either we had to scrub it off with a scotch brite pad So in the first movie they towed a Camaro and sent a Camaro into those bulldozers at the end But in this remake in 1996 they actually used the Challenger filled it with gas and a little bit of dynamite sent it into those bulldozers and blew that shit up Don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty cool sure, it’s a remake, it’s 1996 and it’s for TV But the fact that they actually did the stunt I know it hurts They blew up a challenger, but they actually did the stunt I can respect that I think that’s pretty cool The nice car, the restored car is unit one it was the main hero car that Viggo Mortensen drove.
This one was used mostly for close-ups and Interior driving shots where you’re driving down the road Beauty shots at the beginning of the film and stuff like that But as the movie progressed all the cars matched in that they had the same dirt sprayed on them and stuff like that so When you start running film if a car breaks you can’t stop you can’t have people standing around so you bring in another car and you keep going Ted actually worked on the cars for the movie we were contacted for parts I run Stevens performance in Anderson, Alabama. We cater to parts sales for 62 to 74 Dodge Chrysler, Plymouth vehicles and They had to have all this stuff. You know wheels and all this stuff, so it was nice to be involved It was a lot of fun a lot of late nights So the reason why Ted was able to retain all five cars from this movie was because these cars are actually owned by production Whereas when you look at the first movie, They were loaned to the movie.
Nobody really cared about keeping movie cars up until about maybe three or four years ago now Now they’re important. Back then, just like Bullitt All those cars disappeared. Oh, yeah, well actually when the opportunity came up I said you know we they’re gonna sell these things. I got to have them If memory serves it was one bid for all of them So you got the cars and whatever pieces of them were left We’d seen them in the film and stuff like we saw the pre-production deal It was uh, but it was exciting to actually see the cars because I bought him without seeing them After production was wrapped he took this car and he gave it a full restoration top to bottom this car is perfect Well owning my own parts business helped a lot with the restoration on the cars we had to either had the parts or had access to them and we had a build team that put the car together the Body and paint work was done By mark coats at ABM restoration.
The build team was Benny and Sammy Wyndham from classic car care myself And Steven Nash one of my employees at Stephen’s performance The Interior was toast. When you build movie cars You’re building movie cars. You know the camera Cheats a lot. There’s a lot of things you can’t see so you can use dash caps instead of dash pads And you can use seat covers if somebody’s sitting on where you can’t see them and get away with it This car wasn’t too bad because they didn’t beat it up. I think the only body panel we replaced was the hood Everything else went back on it. This was the hero car so they were kind of careful with it We used as much of the car as we could because we wanted to keep as much of it as we could most of the mechanical components and stuff like that or a lot of that stuff was changed for some reason they wanted to change the Engine type or change the rear-end type, stuff like that You’ve seen all the dodges that I’ve driven in this series Don’t have Hemis.
Ted found it appropriate that this car needs a Hemi in Order to really live up to the name, so now this thing has a Hemi EXHAUST ROAR!!! It’s as it would have come from the factory with a Hemi in it all the frame brackets were put in Dana 60 rear end the whole nine yards, so it looks just like if it rolled off the semi line as a Hemi challenger it drives like a 1970 challenger, it’s 425, 450 horsepower engine with a manual transmission and a rear end with belted tires…it’s out of control You want to have fun with this thing it needs to be somewhere where it’s safe like an airport runway, or a drag strip MUSIC And Ted is the right guy to have these cars, I mean he’s got a massive collection of Props, items from the movies.
He is a connoisseur when it comes to vanishing point I may love the movie, but Ted lives the movie. He’s got everything I don’t have a favorite. I like them both but The first one is still something I’ll sit down and watch every once in a while. My wife makes fun of me because I can rehearse all the lines But if you watch something long enough you can do that and there weren’t a lot of lines in that movie and if you want to see it in person all you got to do is come down to Sevierville in tennessee go to the muscle car museum and there it is Really close you may not be able to touch it, but it is there and sitting for you ready to To come and take a look and it is a real vanishing point challenger not only that it’s the best challenger that I’ve ever seen People come in and like it they enjoy looking at a car that we used in a film.
A lot of people don’t get to see that and This gives them that opportunity This is a movie star. A real time old iconic game-changing movie star. The movie cars are something people enjoy over and over cuz they watch the films. The car guys watch these movies all the time We’re car people. This is what we do Well we’ve seen a probably more involvement with Chrysler and Dodge and Plymouth in the Movies and television shows simply because they like the way they look You know they made a lot of Mustangs and Camaros and they sold more of those But you know you see a lot of television shows and movies they use Chrysler products in them In 2008 we were really thrilled when they came out with the new challenger It’s got all the styling cues of the original car But it’s modern, you can you drive it to work every day unlike one of these original cars When Dodge made the brand new challenger They were giving it to us They were giving it to the guys who wanted to live their fantasies from the movies And they gave us that opportunity to be Kowalski, and all you gotta do is go spend about twenty-five or twenty-six thousand dollars, And you can be a Kowalski You know we started Being interested in these cars in the 60s I’ve always thought that Chrysler styling cues were cutting-edge.
I haven’t seen it done that well since that car Hey everyone here’s a rolling shot of the Dodge Challenger from vanishing point rolling down the highway while I talk to you about the channel, money and The extreme thanks for everyone sticking by me to get me to 40,000 subscribers. It’s absolutely amazing I never thought I would get here. without you guys I never would’ve gotten here Hope you enjoyed it what was the only existing vanishing point challenger.
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