He’s the guy who gets ‘The A-Team’ rolling
Growing up, “The A-Team” car coordinator Rick Rasmussen had an enviable car collection and, luckily for him, he never tossed out his toys.
“I had real cars, fake cars, push cars and pedal cars,” he said. “I still have all my Hot Wheels and all my Dinky Toys. It comes in handy when we’re doing street scenes. You can bring up a little Hot Wheels and explain the scenes and stuff to the director. So I still play with cars.”
Making things go “vroom” is in Rasmussen’s blood. The son of an automotive technician and painter in the small city of Penticton in British Columbia, Canada, Rasmussen guesses he’s “been in a body shop since the age of probably 2.”
When he’d watch movies or television, the vehicles often stood out to him as the real stars.
“I often wondered how people got paid to drive these vehicles around,” he said. “In ‘Smokey and the Bandit’ with all the stunts, I remember as a kid going, ‘Gee whiz, people get paid to actually do that.’”
Rasmussen followed in his father’s footsteps as a technician, painter and body shop owner. Fifteen years ago, he started working on the TV show “Viper,” which he followed from Calgary to Vancouver, where he now lives.
“I moved here for six months 13 years ago,” he joked.
Since then, he’s helped customize vehicles for such films as 2004’s “Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed,” 2006’s “RV” and 2009’s “Watchmen” and “2012.”
“Every vehicle has a personality,” said Rasmussen, who was responsible for more than 300 vehicles for “The A-Team,” including the iconic van. “To me, they’re our kids when we build them. They live and breathe. They won’t run without oxygen.”
Classic form: The main “A-Team” van, which was the one used for most of the film’s close-ups, started life as a 1994 Chevrolet G20 cargo van. “That body style of van was the same from 1971 to 1998,” said Rasmussen. “They didn’t change a thing about it except for headlights and grilles and stuff. So that same body style’s been around forever. The original ‘A-Team’ van was that same body style, and then when we went to do the feature film, our production designer wanted to pay homage to the original one, but give it that feature film feel and update it a bit. The beginning of this movie was to take place in 1998. So we kept it old-school but gave it a present-day touch.”
Ready for their close-ups: Rasmussen and his team gave the main van and its two stunt doubles makeovers for the new millennium. “They were all just basically stock cargo vans, delivery vans and stuff,” he said. “There’s nothing special about these vans when you buy them. To take them from the stock vans to make them into ‘A-Team’ vans, we had to fill all the nameplate holes, all the side marker lights, the mirror holes, key cylinder locks. We installed, obviously, the famous flare set, molded that to the body. We designed our own roof wing. We installed three sunroofs in each van, typically just for our director of photography for lighting. We used metal and fiberglass. Everything was seamless and molded. It was hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of labor in each van.”
Different stripes: To give the vans a more contemporary look, Rasmussen slightly modified the classic stripe design. “Everybody was used to the old stripe design, but we gave it the new feel, changed it up,” he said. “The new van stripe goes along the bodyline. At the front door, the stripe used to turn and then go all the way up to the roof. We took the stripe further along the bodyline, and then turned it and went up into the roof wing and across the roof. So it’s kind of different. The colors are very close, keeping that original black, charcoal and red feel. It’s wonderful. I love it.”
The need for speed: “We hot-rodded them up a bit without going crazy,” Rasmussen said. “We did quite a bit of mechanical work on them from a stock Chevy V8. We changed the intake manifold. We put a bigger fuel injection system on them. We put a performance chip in the computer. We installed headers on them with side pipes. This helps them breathe a lot better and gives a little more performance. We put positraction rear differentials in them so both tires would spin as opposed to one. It gives it a little bit more handling. Each van had a 15-gallon fuel cell installed for safety and stunt purposes. It’s what all the stock cars and drag racers and all that use. In case the vehicle rolls over, there’s no leakage.”
Gumball machine: The “A-Team” hero van has already found a purpose post-wrap in the North American leg of the 2010 Gumball 3000 road rally. “Tony Hawk, a skateboarder guy, got ahold of Fox publicity and asked if he could drive the ‘A-Team’ van for the North American portion,” said Rasmussen. “So we just had him finish that in the van. He drove it from Montreal to Toronto to New York. While everybody else was cooking down the highway, he was stopping to fill up the little 15-gallon fuel cell, but he had fun.”
