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A Call For Humor!

thewas

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I am afraid rather this:

_2_steve_mcqueen_bullitt_car.jpg
 

BolusOfDoom

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What about this car? Here is the most hilarious and mysterious 1/64 replica I've ever seen. I found this in the Target toy department hanging next to the Hot Wheels:

IMG_6291-1.JPG

This is a plain brown family or fleet sedan. This was perfect as a company car for say, a nursing home inspector, and the real McCoy probably smelled like Virginia Slims and McDonalds fries cooked the Old Way. This is not a sports car, not the 'Gran' Torino of Starsky and Hutch with beefy haunches and 5-slot aluminum rims. Why resurrect it now? Let's check the back blurb.

"A Graduate of the Los Angeles Police Academy, Foxy Jill is a carefree and fun-loving California girl with a great flair for beguiling any male she encounters. She's sporty and athletic, and even goes on to become a champion race car driver."

It’s for Foxy Jill played by Farrah Fawcett. I don't think she's beguiling any males with this sedan, but let's look up all the cars appearing in Charlie's Angels in the Internet Movie Cars Database. Oh. It's not there? Let's look it up by car. There it is, in season 1 episode 22. But watching the episode, none of the Angels ever drives it???

It turns out this is NOT a car driven by any significant or recurring character. It appears in exactly ONE episode and was a generic police detective's sedan for a dirty lieutenant on the vice squad played by Ed Lauter, who got gut shot at the climax and never seen again. The car is shown for about a minute of the episode over a few scenes, does not get in any car chase, and does not figure into the plot in any way. The car's only importance is cradling Kate Jackson's (not Farrah's) behind in the passenger seat for most of its single minute. But who decided to commission a 1/64 scale replica of this homely, unsignificant car for distribution in the Target toy department next to the Hot Wheels loop-de-loops?

I mean... imagine if a company that makes 1/64 replica cars decided to license Batman from DC, and instead of the Batmobile, commissioned a replica of Bruce Wayne's country club golf cart. That's what this is. The whole story in the back blurb for this product is a complete invention, and therefore the company could pick any one of the myriad of sport cars featured in the show. But no, we must decorate our shelves with a poop-brown 1974 Ford Torino Brougham driven at legal speeds by a one-episode bad guy of the week who was never seen again. They could at least put Ed Lauter's face on the box. After watching the episode, here's a corrected back blurb:

“Lieutenant Howard Fine is a cop on the take, a veteran of extorting LA’s seediest massage parlors. Dirty Howard is fond of taking brown paper sacks of cash through the open window of his base trim level Ford from the motor pool, in exchange for turning a blind eye to massages that are a bit too ‘hands-on’.”

I guess that blurb won't work in the Target toy department. I’m still trying to figure this thing out. Was there somehow an existing stock of 1/64 brown 1974 Ford Torino Broughams and some poor employee had to come up with the most tenuous thread of connection to Hollywood to move the inventory? Whose business acumen approved a product with a niche thinner than the paper in a pocket New Testament? I still can't figure it out.

FYI, I e-mailed the company and got no reply, which is too bad because a coherent answer would have to be weirder than the product itself.
 

Ken1951

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This reminds of me of when I worked in hifi in 1974 and we sold a system to a guy who took it home and said he didn't need anything explained. He called back later that evening and said it didn't work. One of the salesmen talked him through how he had everything hooked up, come to find out he plugged the receiver into its own unswitched outlet on the back panel!
 

AdamG

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This reminds of me of when I worked in hifi in 1974 and we sold a system to a guy who took it home and said he didn't need anything explained. He called back later that evening and said it didn't work. One of the salesmen talked him through how he had everything hooked up, come to find out he plugged the receiver into its own unswitched outlet on the back panel!
:facepalm:
 

Blumlein 88

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This reminds of me of when I worked in hifi in 1974 and we sold a system to a guy who took it home and said he didn't need anything explained. He called back later that evening and said it didn't work. One of the salesmen talked him through how he had everything hooked up, come to find out he plugged the receiver into its own unswitched outlet on the back panel!
Was a campus security guard once who was given a jeep to drive around. A common need was jumping off student cars with dead batteries. So common they had mounted two bolts to hook battery jumper cables up so you didn't have to raise the hood. One set on each side. Some of us witnessed him one cold morning trying to use them on the jeep. Security jeep didn't start, so he got out the cables, raised the hood and hooked up first one side and then the other being puzzled why it was not working. :facepalm:
 
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