Two Designers Walk Into a Bar · Evergreen Podcasts

The Batmobile and the DeLorean - Iconic Pop Culture Cars

·47 min·3 clips

Ford offered $75,000 to replace the DeLorean with a Mustang, and Bob Gale replied, “Doc Brown doesn’t drive a fucking Mustang.”

The engine noise gets there first. After the Evergreen intro, Elliot and Todd turn a driving joke into a neat lane change toward pop-culture cars and design. Nobody is suggesting drinking and driving. The bit keeps everyone on bar stools, then brings in the original Batmobile and the DeLorean like character entrances. Then the nerd knobs start clicking. On the DeLorean side, they get into glued-on gee-gaws, doodads, circuitry, and the weird movie magic that lets imperfect hardware work when the camera keeps enough distance. Gee-gaw earns its little victory lap. It is exactly the kind of design note this show likes: specific enough to point at the thing, loose enough to keep the laugh alive. The car also sounds half cursed. They talk about factory gee-gaws that apparently did not work, which nudges them toward the idea that the film's sputtering time machine may have picked up something from real DeLorean problems. Then 88 arrives. They explain why 88 miles per hour, or 142 kilometers per hour, was memorable and clean on the speedometer. The best joke is still mechanical: the movie came out in 85, and the production DeLorean's digital speedometer topped out at 85. The dashboard practically gives up. They riff that maybe the car could clear 85 only downhill, broken in just the right way, with a stiff wind behind it. Batman keeps pulling the conversation back. The ending circles through Todd's Batman affection, sponsor jokes, and the bar-show instinct to call for another round. It is fast, loose, and nicely specific, with enough glued-on junk and deadpan correction to keep the design talk from getting precious.

As heard by us

A focused design chat about two famous movie cars, with enough drift to keep it loose.

The episode treats famous movie cars as pop culture design, and that is the right frame. Elliot and Todd keep circling the Batmobile and the DeLorean as two different kinds of spectacle: one built on silhouette and symbol, the other on add-ons, circuitry, and a surface that…

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Why you'd press play

You want a barstool tour of pop-culture cars, from the original Batmobile to the DeLorean and the 88 mph bit that sticks.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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