What year Packards????

[Guest]

Did anyone see the movie The Mummy Returns, or was it the Mummy 2, well anyway, I watch it last night, they had a date in the start of the movie, I think it was 1932, but when the bad guys drove up to Brandon Fraser house, they had, what look like to me, 1366 or 1937 Packard Club Sedans. Has anyone notice this, or is it only me?

[Guest BillP]

Yes! They had not one but two apparently identical cars. We just watched it Friday night. I guessed that they were '37s.<BR>The other car, Brandon Fraser's personal car (the one that got crushed) was (thankfully) not a classic or even old. I don't have any photos of it but when I saw it I thought it may have one of the several Panther four door sedan cars produced maybe in the eighties in England. I noted that it had frameless door windows.

[Guest Randy Berger]

Another Hollywood faux-pas?? Next time you watch Patton, keep an eye peeled for his 1948 Packard staff car. This was during his 1943 African desert campaign. He must have known someone in sales!

[Guest]

I knew that Fraser's car was newer car because of the doors, and my Father pointed out the Packard in the Patton movie. I saw a movie a couple of years ago, the time frame was early 1955, one of the people in the movie was reading a news paper, you could see the date, when a guy drove up in a 56 Ford. I think Hollywood thinks that no one would notice.

[Guest]

Especially since the new model years didn't debut until January in those days. It wasn't until Ike was in office and wanted to boost the economy by keeping automakers working through the holidays that the model year intros were switched to fall. That kept the car plants running in Nov. and Dec. and the cash registers ringing in Detroit.

[Guest]

I will have to add the mummy to my list. I am trying to compile a list of all the movies that have identifiable Packards in them

[Guest]

Ahh.....HOLLYWOOD, the MOVIES and CARS......!<P>After the war ( the BIG one...!) my uncle returned from VietNam (then Indo China) and worked on the movie "IMPACT". In that movie, the "bad guys" steal a new ( 1949) Cadillac Fleetwood Series 75, and get chased off the edge of a cliff, the car going nose first into a rock, ending in a spectacular flaming explosion that left few pieces bigger than a pie-tin.<P>Of COURSE they didn't really wreck the then new '49 Caddy they borrowed from the producer...! They went to a used car lot near the studio and bought this beautiful "mint" '31 Cadillac V-16 Empress Imperial limo. I was only a kid at the time, but I knew this was a tragedy I had to avert. I mowed all the lawns I could, but couldn't scrape up the seventy five dollars fast enough, that it it would have taken to save that fine car.....buy the V-16 from them, and get them something else to wreck. I failed. Bye Bye Empress...!<P>You folks today probably just cant relate to the fact that there was a time, not too long ago, when old cars, espeically large luxuious big-engined true classics, were a subject of scorn, ridicule, even hatred ! Some of you who have seen re-runs of the old "I LOVE LUCY" series may have spotted the one where LUCY demonstrates what an idiot she is, by buying what WE would now call a beautiful true classic automobile!<P>Did I tell you guys in here about the time I tried to get my dad to invest in a '31 "J" series Dusenberg phaeton ? It wasn't "mint"..(probably, by today's judging standards,...only a # 2 or possibly a # 3...!). The guy wanted five HUNDRED dollars for it ! ( a little high..but not outrageous for those days....) "Heck"..I told my dad... " this would be a great family investment..someday..that car will be worth FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS...."! (My dad was too busy watching Groucho Marx's "YOU BET YOUR LIFE"...he knew better than to get involved in some stupid old car.....! )<P>Pete Hartmann<BR>Big Springs, AZ