The bad guys are in their Mk II Jag, screaming along in an attempt to escape Bodie and Doyle, in hot pursuit in their Ford Capri. Engines roar, tyres squeal, wheels spin.
The Jag takes a wrong turning, and before they can react, the baddies’ car goes over a cliff, sailing through the air before crashing into the disused quarry far below and exploding in a huge fireball.
The sharp-eyed amongst us – in fact even just the casual viewer – will have seen that one of the bad guys died horribly – not when the car hit the ground, but when his head fell off on the way down.
The director must have been apoplectic that the props department had provided a second-rate dummy, one with a head so loose that it came adrift at a critical moment. Today you could fix that problem with CGI in post-production, but when this particular episode of The Professionals was made in the late 1970s or early ‘80s, only one camera was used (so no other shot to cut to), there was no CGI in the budget, and presumably they had only one Jag available to sacrifice on the day.
This epic fail isn’t the only one on the small or big screen by any means. Even swords-and-sandals classic Ben Hur starring Charlton Heston has embarrassing scenes in the chariot race when the camera car’s tyre tracks are painfully obvious in the sand of the arena, as Heston wrestles his chariot around the arena.
As a lad I remember watching an episode of Robin Hood on TV, in black and white. Yes, I’m that old. Robin and his merry men were having an arrow-out (equivalent of a shoot-out) in a field, but in the background I could see vehicles driving past on a road. My illusion of Robin’s Sherwood landscape was ruined forever. I hope the director died in a hail of arrows.
In Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, a white car famously makes a cameo appearance in the bottom left of frame during a battle scene. It may however have had tartan upholstery, so could possibly be classed as an extra. Not sure about the fabled vehicle in The Shire in one of the Lord of the Rings movies though. A wizardly trick perchance? Peter Jackson later engaged some invisibility magic and erased it from the DVD version. My Precious…
Auric Goldfinger pulled a disappearing trick on James Bond between scenes at the golf course in the classic movie Goldfinger. As Bond talks to him, Goldfinger is seen sitting in the back of his Rolls Royce, but in the next scene he has vanished. Maybe the car had such a long wheelbase he’d walked back out of sight.
In Tim Burton’s 1996 classic alien invasion film Mars Attacks, Michael J Fox’s character Jason Stone is upstaged by a truck that in one scene falls over in an explosion and in the next is miraculously upright again. I’m sure white van men everywhere would like one of those.
The movie that shot Arnie Schwarzenegger to fame in 1985, Commando, features a self-fixing Porsche, which panel-beats itself back into shape between scenes. Want one? Join the queue.
And how many times have we seen in many, many TV programmes, a car that purportedly arrives at a destination after a long drive, with condensation billowing out from its exhaust? Plainly the vehicle has only just been started up for the scene. Picky I know, but.
There’s no shortage of other things to watch out for on the big and small screens. In car chases when a hubcap falls off, look carefully and you’ll quite possibly see that it magically reattaches itself later. Keep an eye out also for reflections of the camera crew in highly-polished automotive paintwork and chrome. And speaking of highly-polished, why are so many of the vintage vehicles in period movies in such pristine showroom condition – not a scratch, not a dent, not a splash of mud? (Because they’re fully-restored of course, we know that)
If you know your onions, or even your Austins, you’ll find many period movie examples of vehicles being featured that hadn’t even been released at that time.
The same applies to motorcycles; Steve McQueen had obviously gone back to the future in order to leap a 1962 Triumph TR-6 Trophy 650cc over the Stalag Luft III fence in 1944. The bike wasn’t introduced until 1956, twelve years later. In fact, it wasn’t even McQueen jumping the bike over the barbed wire, it was stuntman Bud Ekins. And it wasn’t barbed wire. It was rubber.
Shoot me now!
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