
The way they knew they knocked it out of the park was that none other than Dr. What they ended up with was no less than a brand new ’59 Caddy in perfect Ghostbusters livery. The amount of cubic money has to have been staggering. Everything got looked at, fixed, replaced, restored, polished or taken for lunch in a place where you can’t get reservations. Or in other words, they can make or restore anything.Ĭinema Vehicle Services took the miserably neglected original car and went to town. Their resume is too long to repeat here, but add in various parts of these franchises: Die Hard, American Sniper, The Avengers, Batman, Fast & Furious, Men in Black, The Italian Job, Transformers and Terminator, among a huge number of others. For example, for Gone in Sixty Seconds, they built eleven Eleanor Mustangs. They have a first-rate bunch of departments that can handle virtually anything. But of course you can’t run an outfit like that without also being able to do fantastic-level work on cars, to include extensive custom fabrication.
Ghostbusters ecto 1 model car movie#
They are the single largest supplier of vehicles for the movie and TV industries in the country. You need a fleet of police cars from the mid-eighties? Not a problem. But, finally, someplace along the line, they decided to send the original to a magnificent outfit called “Cinema Vehicle Services.” To quote Akroyd from another one of his movies, The Blues Brothers: “This place has everything.” And indeed they actually do. Well, after working through the rest of the sadly forgettable franchise sequels, the Sony Pictures left the original Ecto 1 to rot outdoors. It is said – perhaps apocryphally – that it ended up causing many traffic accidents while New Yorkers gawked. To say it was an attention-getter is an understatement, particularly as the movie became well known. To promote the movie, the producers sent the car blazing around New York City. A sound designer, Richard Beggs, in a fit of crazed genius, decided to create the Ecto’s odd siren sound by taking a leopard snarl and playing it backwards. Within less than a month, the Ecto 1 emerged. Prop and paint folks at the Burbank Studio went to work. After Reitman gave him the greenlight, he was off and running. Dane drew up sketches as to what he thought it should look like, right down to details on the roofrack. To go from the original to Ecto 1, the production company sent it to a guy named Steve Dane. By 1962, they dominated that market, so it’s no surprise that the Ecto 1 came from them.

They didn’t leave GM in finished form, though: they went to a bunch of third-party fabricators, with this one going to an outfit called Miller-Meteor, which worked exclusively on the Caddy chassis.
Ghostbusters ecto 1 model car professional#
The base model is the ’59 Caddy Fleetwood professional “end loader,” used primarily as ambulances and hearses. As they all note in retrospect: really good call. Someplace there, the Ecto 1 went from sinister to hilarious. Well, one happy week in Martha’s Vineyard, Akroyd, Ramis and Reitman sat down and re-wrote the whole thing, with a real comedic focus, on an electric typewriter.

So, too, was the original Ecto 1 concept: it was a sinister black, looking more like a hearse than an emergency response vehicle, with purple lights on it. Akroyd’s early drafts were decidedly dark, with lots of references to real occultists and metaphysics. The first drafts were the brainchild of Akroyd, but Director Ivan Reitman suggested bringing on the brilliant Harold Ramis, both as a writer and as an actor, ultimately becoming the Dr. Needs some suspension work and shocks and brakes, brake pads, linings, steering box, transmission, rear-end – only $4,800 – maybe new rings, also mufflers.” And with that, the world was introduced to the Ghostbusters’ legendary Ecto 1, aka, The Ectomobile. He jumped out: “Everybody can relax, I found the car. Dan Akroyd wheeled the monster ’59 Caddy into the firehouse driveway like he’d done it every day of his life.
