I remember precisely one thing about the 1981 Disney movie Condorman, which I think I must have seen in the theater as a kid. I must have seen it in the theater because I don’t think it ever made it to television, and I’m pretty sure my family was the last American family to come to possess a VCR. So it had to be in the theater. I would have been about 10, and all I remember of the movie is one scene where an old ramshackle truck had an impossibly low and sleek car burst out of the front of it.
That’s all I ever remembered about that movie, just that one very specific image of a yellow car bursting out of some archaic-looking truck. When I wanted to figure out what the hell that scene was from and if I just imagined it or not in some childhood automotive fever-dream it wasn’t easy to Google, because I really couldn’t remember what the hell the rest of the movie was about.
Were there feathers on the car? I think so! It was sort of a superhero movie? An avian-themed superhero? Birdman? No. Hawkman? No. Something like that. Egretman? Emuman? The Human Pelican? Condor! It was Condorman!
The movie was a strange Disney sorta-superhero, sorta-spy movie. It wasn’t great. Here’s the trailer:
It was about a comic book artist who sort of inadvertently “became” his superhero creation, and somehow managed to build all of the fancy equipment and cars and flying suits and whatever, getting involved with a KGB defector and all manner of other hijinx. The lead guy was kind of charmless, and the movie wasn’t really that great.
Well, I should say the movie itself wasn’t great, but there were some fantastic car chases in it. The chases were choreographed by Rémy Julienne, the man behind the car chases in a number of James Bond movies and, most significantly, The Italian Job. So, the car chase sequences definitely punched well above their weight, especially the one I remembered from my childhood, which, happily, I can show you, right now:
Oh man, there is so much going on there. It starts with a big, lumbering truck – it looks a bit like a Bedford, but it was built specifically for the movie, being chased by four black Porsche 911s, led by what looks like a Porsche 930 slantnose:
(Screenshot: Disney via YouTube)
I kind of suspect that slantnose was a studio-modified normal 911, but still, it’s fun to see. They make quite an imposing and menacing pack of cars, especially when their prey is something as lumbering and helpless as this truck:
(Screenshot: Disney via YouTube)
There’s a lot going on with that sorta-Bedford truck: it has that charming home-built camper back that looks like some sort of Romanian dacha, along with all of those bundled quilts or bags of whatever lashed to the bumper there. It’s a bit of a confusing mess, but it all makes sense when that truck’s party trick is revealed:
(Screenshot: Disney via YouTube)
It births a sportscar! A low, sleek, condor-livery’d sportscar! The sportscar emerges, and just casts its former shell aside, like some sort of automotive hermit crab.
(Screenshot: Disney via YouTube)
I do love the control panel shown for the inside of the Condormobile; the green-phosphor video displays were very much products of their era, and I like how the button typography is the legendary and improbably-named Westminster typeface, a staple of sci-fi proto-cyber stuff since the late ’60s.
(Screenshot: Disney via YouTube)
The physics of how this all could have worked are probably best left unexamined. Condorman and the lovely KGB defector somehow drop down into the Condormobile, even though the car does not seem to have any sort of opening roof? And the Condormobile was the basis of the truck all along, somehow, just driven from a secondary cab above? Sure, why not?
And, most importantly, just what the hell is the Condormobile? Perhaps not too shockingly for anyone who has dug into movie cars, it’s based on a Volkswagen Beetle. It’s a Sterling Nova kit car, or perhaps a Cimbria, as an earlier version was known, and it later was known as an Eagle in the UK, then a Viper 2000, then a Nereia – this basic fiberglass bodyshell has had a ton of names and lives. The first version, the Nova, was designed by a man named Richard Oakes, in the UK.
I thought this particular version is one of the Cimbria ones, which was an unsanctioned variation on the Sterling kit, made by Joe Palumbo.
(images: Amore Cars)
But I was wrong; it seems the Condorman cars were actual modified Sterling Novas, which featured, among other things, a canopy-style door setup, which you can see in action in this video:
Air-cooled VW fanatics may recognize that parking brake boot, too. The engine I think is still an air-cooled VW flat-four, but it has some big headers that make it sound a lot more ravenous.
What’s especially interesting about the Sterling kit is how relatively easy it seems to have been to assemble. This old 1974 Hot Rod article suggests you can do it all in about 40 hours, because so much of the kit is done for you – glass is installed, the canopy is installed, and it’s just 28 bolts onto a stock – as in no need to shorten – VW chassis and you’re pretty much good to go. That’s impressive.
Of course at $2195 (about $14,000 today) the kit cost almost as much as a 1974 Beetle would have back then, $2,625 ($16,914), but, damn, look what you end up with! Though, to be fair, the designer, Richard Oakes, did once say that the car was “designed for the enjoyment of the person looking at the car and not for the driver” but that’s also what made it perfect for its role in movies, like Condorman.
It’s also worth noting that the most recent official appearance of the Condormobile and Condorman was in a Pixar short called Small Fry, taking place in the Toy Story universe and featuring fast-food kids’ meal toys. It’s pretty funny:
…and here’s Condorman’s cameo:
(Screenshot:Pixar via YouTube)
That’s a pretty good likeness of the Sterling Nova/Condormobile.
Really, that car is very likely the best part of that whole movie. It’s certainly all I remembered about the film over 40 years later, so that has to mean something, right?
Oh man, that takes me right back to being 6 years old! We Condorman and Herbie goes to Monte Carlo on a rainy weekend. My dad had a silver 69 911E at the time and after Condorman I was all about how he needed to put a whale tail on it and paint it black.
What a great nostalgia hit. Pretty sure the reason I saw this as a kid was that the library only had movies that blockbuster wouldn’t bother stocking.