Tuesday, June 09, 2009

The Knightmare: A Hero is His Car

Maybe this is an American thing, or possibly an Angeleno thing, but many of our pulp heroes and heroines have been defined by the vehicle they drive (or pilot):

Batman has the Bat-mobile...
The Shadow has Shrevvy the cab driver chauffeur him around in a Yellow cab...
The Green Hornet has The Black Beauty...
and Wonder Woman has her Invisible Plane.

So, while I paint a pretty good audio picture of our horrific hero's car in part one of The Knightmare: The Murder Legion Strikes at Midnight, it was one sharp-eared listener who goes by the handle "Planish" over at the Audio Drama Talk forums who knew the truth...

The Knightmare's rolling arsenal is real.

From the Corsair wiki (emphasis mine):

Heinz planned to put the Phantom Corsair, which cost approximately $24,000 to produce in 1938 (approximately $300,000 in 2005 dollars) into limited production at an estimated selling price of $12,500. However, Heinz's death, shortly after the car was completed, ended those plans.

The completely unique 1938 Phantom Corsair now resides in the National Automobile Museum (The Harrah Collection) in Reno, Nevada.

The full story of this car, as well as studio pictures, appears in the October 2006 edition of Classic and Sports Car magazine.


I hate to burst their bubble, but that's not the full story...

You can discuss this here or over at the Fans of the Knightmare Facebook board.

2 comments:

DecoderRing said...

Aren't fan boards the best? There was a similar discussion at ADT about the Red Panda's unspecified vehicle make a few months ago that centered on the Corsair, the 1934 Airflow and I think one other... and then turned into a conversation about autogyros.

scottygod said...

That's the car I was going to have the Green Ghost drive until I nixed the idea of a car altogether. She's a beauty.