Cars in Film: 1974 Pinto from the Blues Brothers

By Rob Einaudi

Editor-in-Chief

Everyone hates Nazis, especially Illinois Nazis. Too bad their cool orange Pinto wagon had to die with them. Believe it or not, the producers of the Blues Brothers had to get a special airworthiness (or unworthiness?) certificate for the Pinto from the FAA to certify that the car would not fly off-course when it was dropped from a helicopter in the famous scene. As a result, they first had to drop a duplicate car in a remote area to see how far off from vertical it would travel while falling. So two Pintos died for the sake of art. Oh well… Sadly, I could not find a photo of the actual drop.

Update: check out this site. Thanks for the link Gary!

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Posted at 11:21 pm in 1974, Cars in Flim, Ford, Hollywood, Pinto

Comments

GTwildfire
Apr 4, 2008 at 2:35 am

I once drove a friend’s pinto looooong ago. Definitely not much of a loss. I guess some should remain for posterity but yeah, they were as bad as their rep, and time should not change their original evaluation.

Gary Faules
Apr 4, 2008 at 12:43 am

CORRECTION….

Here is the correct link for falling Pinto.

illinoisnazisfreefallin.ytmnd.com

Gary Faules
Apr 4, 2008 at 12:39 am

They used six Pinto’s for the Nazi car that flew off the bridge. There was a lot of trouble getting a permit to do this since they had to prove that they could accurately predict where the car was going to land. They dropped one as a test run into a cornfield. They sawed two in half, to get the camera inside them. They
used one for the low-drop into a ditch in the road and two for the high drop off the bridge. Here is a video of the falling Pinto with some great music……

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://content.ytmnd.com/content/7/6/4/7646f8cdfa0786a7a49dce50e85fbe33.jpg&imgrefurl=http://ytmnd.com/keyword/fall%3Fstart%3D120%26PHPSESSID%3D6ff3d0d970c7a1837…&h=250&w=300&sz=21&hl=en&start=1&tbnid=aQ1ZuHNchIvGYM:&tbnh=97&tbnw=116&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dblues%2Bbrothers%2Bpinto%2B%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG%26ie%3DUTF-8

retroman
Apr 3, 2008 at 11:52 pm

Better a Pinto than say a Mustang. Pintos if you remember were some of the worst cars ever built. The car everyone hated, but everybody bought they say. (Wonder if the gas tank exploded in the test cars)