The festive season is a very traditional time of year, including its Christmas movies showcased every holiday season.
We at MyStarCollectorCar look forward to the annual Yuletide flicks because Christmas movies help set the mood for the Yuletide season and subsequently crank up the festive dial by several notches.
However, MyStarCollectorCar is an e-zine entity that skews heavily toward vintage rides, so we concentrated on the mechanical background characters in Christmas movies for this article.
Jim Sutherland
The first internal combustion engine-powered entry on our Christmas movie list is the 1919 Dodge Brothers touring car driven into a tree at one point by George Bailey during a pivotal “what-if?” sequence in the plot.
The warm and fuzzy ending to the movie glosses over the car crash and the notion George was drunk while piloting his vintage Dodge Brothers drop top into a sturdy tree. Merry Christmas George, you beat a DUI on that one.
The second famous Christmas movie car on our list is the 1937 Oldsmobile Six four-door touring sedan in ‘A Christmas Story’. Ralphie may have had his sight set on a BB gun but, if he was old enough to drive, he may have wanted his old man’s ’37 Olds for Christmas.
Instead, his main interaction with the car was a roadside flat tire incident when Ralphie got to flex his profanity muscles after the car’s lug nuts were sent flying into the snow. The moment had serious repercussions for Ralphie and proved to be a setback to his BB gun Christmas gift obsession, but the movie also had a warm and fuzzy ending that included a shot of the ’37 Olds.
The third addition to MyStarCollectorCar’s movie car list is the 1989 Ford Taurus station wagon used in the opening road rage sequence in “Christmas Vacation’.
The little long roof Ford became a stunt car during the opening moments of ‘Christmas Vacation’ and exited the movie as quickly as it exited the highway. But the Ford wagon left a lasting impression in the annals of Christmas movie cars.
Honorable mention goes to the dilapidated 1972 Ford Condor II motorhome.
It was owned by Cousin Eddie in ‘Christmas Vacation, a sorry vehicle owned by Clark Griswald’s even sorrier cousin.
The fourth add-on to our Christmas movie car list is part of an ongoing debate about whether it’s even a Christmas movie, namely ‘Die Hard’. The jury could go either way on this point but ‘Die Hard’ takes place on Christmas Eve, so we are willing to give the movie the benefit of the doubt in this debate.
The ‘Die Hard’ Christmas car in question is the 1980s-era Chevrolet Caprice/Impala police car bombed by a dead guy thrown out of a window by the John McLane character played by Bruce Willis in the action flick with Yuletide overtones.
McLane gives a generous array of violence and mayhem presents in the Christmas movie, but his corpse gift that falls onto the Chevy cop car’s hood is likely McLane’s most memorable present. Even if it wasn’t delivered in the finest tradition of Christmas gift-giving.
The fifth and final Christmas car movie on our list is the 1995 GMC Suburban 1500 SLT mega-wagon driven by harried parent Howard Langston (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) and used in a desperate search for an incredibly scarce Christmas toy for Howard’s son.
The ’95 Suburban is used up on a frantic Christmas Eve quest to find the action toy and eventually gets stripped for parts before its exit-stage-left, but not before the large mechanical beast makes a big contribution to the Christmas movie.
It may be true that Christmas movies typically have happy endings. But not for their car stars on our list.
Jim Sutherland
BY: Jim Sutherland
Jim Sutherland is a veteran automotive writer whose work has been published by many major print and online publications. The list includes Calgary Herald, The Truth About Cars, Red Deer Advocate, RPM Magazine, Edmonton Journal, Montreal Gazette, Windsor Star, Vancouver Province, and Post Media Wheels Section.
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