Rebirth of the Wackymobile
Things you never learned in driver’s ed:
* Installing a giant Zippo lighter on the roof of your car will turn the vehicle into a “chick magnet.”
* When traveling through Chicago in an oversized Mr. Peanut, don’t trust the height signs on underpasses.
* If you’re behind the wheel of a 5-ton cat, expect to hear endless jokes about litter boxes.
* The secret to parallel parking a 25-foot lobster is to be the only car on the block. Also, remember to feed all the meters.
Such are the rules of the road for product mobiles, America’s wackiest form of transportation. After virtually disappearing in the 1970s, motorized hot dogs, telephones and other objects are enjoying a sudden renaissance.
Dozens of these wheeled advertisements now prowl the countryside, handing out samples, sponsoring jingle contests and sometimes raising money for charities at Super Bowls, fairs, store openings and any other event that draws a crowd.
The new generation of mutant cars is more technologically advanced. Gadgets include chocolate-scented exhaust, global positioning navigation and big, electric-powered tongues. In road tests by Car and Driver and others, highway speeds topped out at 100 mph.
The birthplace for many product vehicles is a nondescript warehouse in Santa Barbara. Inside, electric saws whine and Led Zeppelin blasts from a stereo as workers tinker with the Hershey’s Kissmobile, which is in town for its annual physical. Nearby, a massive Styrofoam cat head rests on the floor, awaiting reattachment to the Pfizer Revolution Mobile, which displays a huge dog and cat to advertise an anti-flea medication.
This is Prototype Source, a company that used to specialize in assembling concept cars for the likes of Volkswagen and GM, but now devotes half its time to building product mobiles.
In 1992, owners Bruce Brackman and Dorian Duke helped redesign the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, sculpting a scale model and testing it in Caltech’s wind tunnel. That led to the Hershey Kissmobile. And once the chocolate car hit asphalt, requests began pouring in.
In Brackman’s dusty office, file cabinets brim with sketches of surreal vehicles, most of which will never see daylight. “We’re lucky if 10% get past the concept stage,” he says, noting that price tags run as high as $500,000. Among the rejects: an amphibious crustacean that could crawl out of the ocean onto the highway; a humongous pantyhose container; a motorized tub of Country Crock margarine; and “The Vault,” a towering glass box in which game-show contestants were supposed to catch cash blown around by electric fans.
Moving an idea from paper to pavement usually takes six months, but technology eases the workload. For the Pfizer mobile, Prototype Source sculpted a small cat and dog from wax, then mapped the surface with lasers and fed the data into a computerized router, which carved exact replicas--100 times bigger--out of giant blocks of Styrofoam.
Brackman’s favorite project is the Planters hot rod. Finished in 1999, it features a hulking Mr. Peanut with a rotating head and a foot-wide monocle. Behind the eyeglass, a video camera tapes spectators and projects their images onto a big-screen TV. Other flourishes include taillights from a 1959 Cadillac (Prototype Source always borrows lights from existing vehicles so it doesn’t have to get Department of Transportation approval), exhaust pipes that glow red at night and a trunk big enough for a baby elephant.
The hot rod gets about 14 miles a gallon and is built on a GMC truck chassis that Brackman considers “bulletproof.”
Alas, Mr. Peanut himself isn’t quite as invincible. Entering a mismarked underpass in Chicago, the big legume lost his hat. (Planters found a local boat repair center to rebuild the fiberglass chapeau.)
“It’s important to have a network of body shops,” says Scott Moller of Marketing Werks, a Chicago PR agency specializing in mobile publicity campaigns.
Attention Grabber
Goofy things happen when product mobiles meet their fans.
“You’d be surprised how many freeway exits we miss because people pull up alongside to snap photos or give us the thumbs-up sign--and we can’t change lanes,” says Tom Frederick, a driver for Clawde, “the world’s largest anatomically correct lobster on wheels,” a 3,000-pound crustacean mounted atop a Ford pickup to promote Red Lobster restaurants.
There’s also no shortage of spectator wisecracks--although they’re usually the same ones. “My swimming pool is full of butter, come on by,” people tell Clawde’s drivers.
Zippo car helmsman Dave Murray knows the drill. “Without fail, people ask me for a light,” he says. And then there are the Wienermobile remarks, which are typically unprintable.
But just as often, drivers turn the tables and create jokes of their own. Wienermobile crews open their windows at intersections and ask motorists if they have any Grey Poupon.
And the Meow Mix cat, with a motorized tongue that flicks back and forth through the radiator grill, cruises into drive-thru restaurants and orders a milkshake. Purina has toyed with the idea of converting a Volkswagen Beetle into a kitten and having it trail the large cat.
Perhaps the biggest hazard to operating a product mobile is the fender-bender. The Hershey’s Kissmobile has been hit about half a dozen times, says Brackman. (Maybe motorists get distracted by the smell of chocolate wafting from an industrial crock pot hidden in the back?)
But pedestrians also take a toll. People constantly poke and scrape at the vehicle’s three giant kisses to see if the foil wrapping is real. (It isn’t. To simulate the genuine article, Prototype created a huge papier-mache chocolate, clothed it in industrial foil and then made a mold.)
Another logistical issue: getting gas. It can take a full hour, not because the tank is bottomless, but because people mob the vehicle whenever it parks.
“Every time you stop your vehicle, you have an event,” says Tom Lindell of Colle & McVoy, the marketing firm behind the Pfizer mobile.
Well, usually. When humorist Dave Barry was allowed to drive the Wienermobile through Miami a few years ago, pedestrians barely noticed the 27-foot frank. “You’d have thought these people got hourly visits from the Wienermobile, the way they ignored it,” he wrote.
Other drivers tell a different story. The Zippo car is a total babe magnet, says driver Murray, echoing remarks made by more than a few product mobile chauffeurs: “It definitely helps with the action after hours.”
Another bonus is seeing how many faces light up in the presence of such playful vehicles. “It’s a blast,” says Gretchen Garber, a former Kissmobile crew member who now oversees other drivers. Garber recalls two little boys visiting the vehicle and then returning with a gift of candy canes, telling her, “You probably get tired of eating chocolate.”
The road crews end up feeling like celebrities. People wave, honk and even clap when they enter restaurants.
However, the attention can be wearying. Drivers quickly learn to stay in hotels that are within walking distance of restaurants, so they can leave the vehicle behind and dine in peace.
A Long Line of Ancestors
The ancestry of product mobiles is hard to trace, but may date back to ancient Greece, when soldiers designed the Trojan Horse. If there were ox-driven carts or Conestoga wagons shaped like medieval all-beef franks or Wild West whiskey bottles, history has mercifully not recorded them.
In modern times, the 1918 Pep-O-Mint Lifesavers truck was one of the pioneer product mobiles. It was followed by cars shaped like Electrolux vacuum cleaners, Heinz pickles and a huge can of V-8 juice with celery sprigs emblazoned on the seats.
The most enduring mobile, of course, is the internal-combustion wiener, which Oscar Mayer christened in 1936. In various incarnations, the gas-powered sausage roamed the country until 1977, when the company’s five-car fleet was mothballed in favor of TV advertising.
In 1986, a frail Wienermobile limped from storage to mark the program’s 50th anniversary. Public reaction was so enthusiastic that Oscar Mayer commissioned an updated model. The latest version weighs as much as 140,000 hot dogs and comes loaded with GPS navigation system, relish-colored passenger seats, a sound system that blares 21 versions of the Oscar Mayer jingle (polka, rap, classical, etc.) and a low-power AM radio transmitter that broadcasts messages to passing cars.
When Al Unser Jr. took the big orange tube for a spin on the Indy 500 track, it clocked 100 mph.
At first, the updated Wienermobiles faced negligible competition. But in 1996, Zippo revived its 1947 motorized lighter--a Chrysler Saratoga with fiberglass flames shooting out of the roof. A year later, Hershey unveiled the Kissmobile, and the rush was on.
Nabisco officials spied Hershey’s car in a magazine and promptly ordered the Mr. Peanut roadster. Today, the number of whimsical autos has mushroomed to include 14 Wienermobiles, two Kissmobiles (with a third on order), a pair of Meow Mix cats, a squad of 13-foot-tall shopping carts big enough to lug 360 grocery bags, a La Quinta Inn hotel room encased in glass, assorted Harley Davidson motorcycles with giant Coke bottle sidecars, a Volkswagen Beetle converted into a BTI telephone and--coming in March--a leviathan can of Spam.
Last August, Car and Driver magazine dusted off its radar guns and traffic cones for a road test of “America’s best-loved and least-maneuverable” vehicles. But the idea didn’t come off as planned.
The Wienermobile backed out, apparently fearing protests by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (whose members sometimes try to disrupt Wienermobile events, a tactic that invariably backfires on PETA).
Four rival vehicles did show, but the slalom race and other events were quickly scuttled.
The Zippo car proved so top-heavy that “rounding the mildest curve caused [it] to moan and wail like a house in need of a good exorcist,” the magazine said. And the Eckrich Meats Fun House, a cartoonish casa with squirting flowers and a working barbecue, handled like 13,500 pounds of Jell-O, weaving in the slightest cross breezes. “It would be hard to imagine a less aerodynamic vehicle,” Car and Driver reported.
Actually, there is one that’s worse. The Nickelodeon cable network recently commissioned a real-life replica of the bloated camper featured in its cartoon “The Wild Thornberrys.”
Built atop a GM motor home chassis (which is nothing more than wheels, an engine and a steering wheel), it gets just 3 miles per gallon. “It’s the tallest, widest thing that’s still street legal,” says Prototype Source’s Brackman, who brought the monstrosity to life. “It has the worst aerodynamics possible.”
Why?
“It was designed by a cartoonist.”
A Phenomenon With Limits
Despite such impracticalities, product mobiles have legions of fans.
“They beautifully combine America’s passion for all things automotive with its passion for shameless hucksterism,” says Dan Neil of Car and Driver.
For advertisers, the cars offer a way to break through the clutter of ads on TV, radio, the Internet and print, says Marketing Werks’ Moller.
But the phenomenon might have limits. Already, product mobiles have become so ubiquitous that they’re creating their own rush hours. In Wichita, Kan., the Meow Mix kitty recently found itself tailing Clawde, the lobster. And in Albany, N.Y., a Wienermobile crossed paths with a Hershey’s Kiss.
“Eventually, they could become passe,” says Peter Breen, editor of Promo magazine. “If people start seeing a couple of these vehicles a day, heads will stop turning.”
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Roy Rivenburg’s e-mail address is roy.rivenburg@latimes.com.
