What is it they say about hindsight? It’s always 6’4″? That’s not right. Hindsight is always something. Something that means from our vantage point in the future, we can easily spot all the mistakes of the past. Mistakes like, oh, let’s just say something like literally exploding to smithereens one of the most desirable of classic Ford Mustangs in order to not harm what is pretty much universally accepted as the least desirable Ford Mustang. A mistake like that, to our modern eyes, seems absolutely batshit. And yet, here’s the thing: that exact situation happened, not once, but twice, thanks to the magic of a ridiculous 1970s television show called Charlie’s Angels.
I’m sure you, a metabolizing human capable of reading the written word, has heard of Charlie’s Angels, a show about a private Los Angeles detective agency staffed by three beautiful, ass-kicking women, some sort of valet, and run by a disembodied voice on a speakerphone. If you need a little taste of the peculiar sort of magic this show was, here’s the opening from season one:
https://youtu.be/OVtVru9KXao
There you go! Now you understand! Anyway, one of the Angels, Kelly (played by Jaclyn Smith), drives a Ford Mustang II, which is, according to current thinking, the Mustang most likely to be considered “garbage” by, well, pretty much everyone. I mean, I kinda like them, but partially because everyone thinks they’re garbage.
Anyway, in season one, episode 13, titled Angel Trap, which you can see in full here that Mustang II gets blown up! With a bomb that looks like it was borrowed from a Road Runner cartoon’s Acme products stash:
The blowing up, along with some good Mustang II hooning, can be seen at 25 minutes into the episode. Let’s see what happens as Kelly parks her car:
Okay, all looks fine. Next, she runs away, but Charlie, on a very loud and surprisingly clear early car radio-telephone, tells her she needs to go back to the soon-to-be-exploded car and get some briefcase, which is full of very important plot devices. Then it’s cool for her to run away to safety:
Of course, soon after she gets away, we get the payoff:
Yes, yes, kablammo, and then we see the sad, smoldering aftermath:
Yikes, what a mess! That Kelly sure got lucky!
But wait a minute – let’s look at that Mustang II again:
Something looks a bit off about it, right? Computer! Zoom, enhance, compare with timecode something something!
Holy crap. Look at that. The Mustang that blew up doesn’t look like a Mustang II at all! It’s a first-generation, 1964 to 1966 Mustang, cleverly disguised with Mustang II taillights (it was the first American car to have amber rear turn indicators in those lights, by the way) and a half-vinyl roof and some hastily-applied tape to simulate moldings and other trim!
But make no mistake: that’s an original Mustang, the kind people will harass you at your home in order to get, as we’ve learned. But back in 1976, when this episode was being shot? It was just some 10-year-old heap. The Mustang II was the new car, and it seems had too much value to be just blown up, especially when there were plenty of old Mustangs around LA a Charlie’s Angels producer could get for a few bucks and a wad of hair you claim was from from Farah Fawcett. Maybe a faked autograph, too.
Incredibly, people seemed to really want to watch Kelly’s Mustang II getting blown up (perhaps a bit of foreshadowing of the future of automotive culture there), so it was blown up again, in another episode, and they used the same put-an-original-Mustang-in-a-Mustang II-costume bit again:
You can see it even better here, all the Mustang II visual cues tacked on, and then seem to be the first things blown off when the car explodes.
I’m really fascinated by this, because it’s such a great example of how we generally have no idea what will be valuable one day when it comes to cars. I mean, we can make educated guesses and some smart predictions, but back in 1976, it’s very clear that nobody was thinking an original Mustang would be the collector car icon it is today. And, even better, nobody seemed to realize that the Mustang II would be seen as, charitably, an embarrassing interlude in the Mustang’s evolution that was a necessary evil in the era of the Gas Crisis.
If we peek at some recent prices of original Mustangs and Mustang IIs we can see some pretty significant differences. First-generation Mustangs sell for $30 to $80,000 routinely, and even the best Mustang IIs don’t always even hit $10,000. They’re getting a bit more pricey, mostly because there’s hardly any left, because so few people bother to keep or restore them. In fact, I remember the curator of the Petersen Museum in LA telling me that the hardest Mustang to find for their retrospective exhibit was a Mustang II, because nobody really restores those!
But, again, that wasn’t the case in 1976! I suspect that if you were to tell a hardcore Mustang lover that you once worked on a TV show in the 70s and made the call to explode two original Mustangs to save one Mustang II, I’m guessing you’d be seconds from either a harsh, wrathful slap or watching an adult sob, openly, unashamedly. Probably both.
Wow, Jason’s been eating his carrots. I need to go see that again now.
Come to think of it, since Charlie’s Angels invisible subtitle was The Ford Show, I’m surprised they didn’t have Kelly borrow someone’s Chevy Monza for this episode.
It’s all cyclical—10 years later on “Murder, She Wrote” Bryan Cranston got blown up (sorry, spoilers on a 40-year-old episode of TV) in what was supposed to be a Fox Mustang, but was clearly a Mustang II without even the clever attempts at disguise seen here.
Yeah in the mid 1970s, a first gen Mustang was nothing special. 1964.5/1965 Mustangs, particularly basic 6 cyl ones were a dime a dozen and were plentiful and not desirable.
It was similar with late 1960s Dodge Chargers with the making of The Dukes of Hazzard.
The Mustangs they blew up back then were likely cars that would have been scrapped soon anyway.
I’m trying to think of what the modern equivalent would be… Maybe something like a Honda Civic coupe like this:
https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtml?listingId=692392239
Or a late 2000s Mustang with the far less desirable 4L SOHC V6 like this one:
https://www.autotrader.com/marketplace/buy/ford/mustang/2009/1ZVHT80N195126854?listingId=687863998
I was going to say the same thing about he dukes charger, but then there was Knight rider. Gotta wonder how many first edition Gen 3 T/A’s from the 80’s were demolished and yet are still not worth much
Today’s current Bronco Sport gets the same cred, IMHO. I mean, the current Bronco II.
One of the greatest contributions of the Mustang II was its front end clip and front suspension. This has been used in quite a few custom builds over the past 30+ years. Not into it enough to give examples. Oh well.
Why is the Mustang II front suspension so popular?
Chuck Lombardo, who gained fame in the 1970s through his California Street Rods shop, is usually credited with finding essentially a bolt-in solution in 1974: the Mustang II front suspension with its rack-and-pinion steering. Among its benefits were compact packaging and good geometry for agile handling.Aug 18, 2017
it was mostly the compact nature of the setup. Fit in a lot of street rods acceptably. I would question the Mustang 2 when the word agile handling was used though.
You’ve clearly never driven one. You can’t compare them to a modern car, no car from 1976 will hold its own against a modern vehicle. You have to compare them to the vehicles they were competing with. They handled pretty well.
As a vintage VW owner, it’s fascinating to see how many of them (all models) get destroyed in movies and TV shows, even up into the 90s. Of course no one would ever have thought that those basic, inexpensive disposable cars would ever have value one day. What immediately comes to mind is a scene from Herbie Goes Bananas, where they dropped a clean-looking Beetle right off the side of an ocean liner. Of course if you watch any pre 1980 movie with street scenes, you can almost always spot a Beetle. It’s always fascinating to me, because I’m only 30 and grew up in the South, so theres never been a time in my life where they were commonplace. Well, except my two weeks in Peru in 2014. They were everywhere! At one of our hostels there were like six in the parking lot. I was in heaven.
Makes you wonder, what unassuming cars will be collectible in 30 years?
The Murano Cross Cabriolet
“ It’s always fascinating to me, because I’m only 30 and grew up in the South, so theres never been a time in my life where they were commonplace”
When I was young in the 1970s, Beetles and Microbuses were still common and not desirable.
On the plus side, they were great in snow, but had shitty heaters/HVAC. Plus they rusted to shit fast in the rust belt unless you were religious about getting getting anti-rust treatment every year.
By the late 1980s, they weren’t common in the Toronto area anymore… mainly due to rust.
Watching Tobi Halicki’s original “Gone in 60 Seconds” from 1974 is especially painful. Over 90 “late model” (for ’74) cars are destroyed over the course of the 40+ minute-long chase scene.
I love that movie (it’s soooo awful) and love that chase scene!!! But yeah, watching all those cars get destroyed is definitely painful. But given the context at the time, most of them were just used cars. My favorite is the lime green 1971 Charger that slides into the garbage truck and it dumps all over the car.
This seems quaint compared to the number of Challengers the Dukes of Hazard destroyed…
Chargers. And yes, something around 300 1969 Dodge Chargers were destroyed making the show.
This reminds me of the original Vanishing Point, where in the end, they show Kowalski driving at >freezes video< first gen camaro into the bulldozers at the end
Mercury ad exec’s in the 90’s: Let’s use one of the Charlie’s angels to be our spokesperson!
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But maybe not Jaclyn Smith.
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What’s the Scarecrow and Mrs. King actress doing? She seems safe.
This is pretty cathartic because I got raked over the coals (I saw it coming so I shouldn’t complain) at the old lighting site for characterizing the Mustang II as an example of retro design done right, and this really drives the point home. The Mustang II had more in common with the original Mustang than the bloated ’73 Mustang – so much in common that you could clearly tape a vinyl top on the original and blow it up as a stand-in and everyone was cool.
I’ll rake you over the coals here; the Mustang II is an abomination and we should destroy every single one of them because of how shit they are.
I would
lovelike to have a Mustang II in good condition, because it is interesting and no one else has one. I cannot imagine anything more boring than being at a car show with one of 200 first-gen Mustangs.Me neither, but they’re numerous because they’re at least attractive. I could go through the rest of my life without seeing a first gen mustang or camaro ever again, tbh.
Sticking to my guns anyway. Besides, while the half-vinyl topped coupes weren’t all that attractive, the fastback versions were. Plus their suspensions were ahead of their time, so some easy upgrades to the 302 brought some great performance. Cobra II’s are pretty desirable on the collector market. Want me to double down? The 1994 is the ugliest Mustang. Somehow the Mustang went from being copied by the Celica in the 70’s to copying the Celica in the 90’s.
And I had to buy a DVD of Bullitt for an episode of Reels & Wheels Podcast. The movie sucks. The car chase is the only good scene. And Steve McQueen spends most of the movie just staring at the camera trying to show off his sexy eyes.
What do I need to air in this comment? 3rd Gen Camaros are great. The 1980’s Monte Carlo SS is a beautiful car. The Corvair was wrongly maligned but was still kind of an unpredictable overengineer death trap. The LT1 sucks.
Damn I feel better.
That’s… That’s a solid rant…
Still ugly. No care.
I complelay agree with Bullitt it does suck! The car chase is great though.
A fun idea I had was to recreate that chase with crappy cars like a Mustang II and a Dodge Neon! Now that would be really fun, I have been up for the past 18 hours…. my brain is broken.
The fastback Mustang II, you mean the Pinto? Naw, they looked terrible as well.
This is another reason why I love our community. There is always someone to defend a car no matter how unpopular it is. As an owner of several unloved cars, I salute you. 🙂
I for one have always kinda wanted to build the world’s crappiest Hoonicorn tribute out of a Mustang II notchback, possibly as a WRX body swap for the AWD. It doesn’t sound as much fun though now that Ken Block wouldn’t be able to see it.
Are you on the discord? I had that idea a year or so ago and put Actual Thought into the IInicorn, or “tuna” for short. It’s even got the hood dips for the turbos
Nope. I am on Discord, but not for anything automotive other than the Opposite-lock Discord server I never look at.
I’m on Oppo too, not as often as I used to be. The autopian discord is still small enough to not suffer the problems Oppo has
The actual Opposite-lock website is much better IMO, it’s the only social media I regularly check anymore. And at least there, even though there are a lot of people, posts aren’t made so frequently that they get buried too soon.
I’ll add to the pile-on and rake you over the coals as well! The Mustang II sucked. It might have had good elements, but overall, it sucked. It was a Pinto in drag.
Yeah the original Mustang was just a Falcon in drag… but the Falcon was a better car for its time than the Pinto was.
Had it not been for the oil crisis, the Pinto/Mustang II would have been miserable failures.
Ford got really lucky with their timing.
The frick you going on about? Aside from the gas tank, the Pinto was a good car for its time. Yeah everything from the 70s is crap by modern standards, but the Pinto had excellent handling compared to every other American car of the era and a genuinely good engine that went on to be successful in other cars as well. Being Pinto-based is not nearly as bad of a thing as you think it is.
The Falcon was fine for an early 60s compact platform that was built to be cheap, practical, and economical and nothing else, and it really was nothing else. It didn’t handle well, it was barely fast enough to be acceptable, and the styling was controversial. There was nothing special about the Falcon other than it being small, cheap, and Mustang-related. Even to this day, the best thing you can say about Falcons is that performance parts for Mustangs will fit on them, which makes them cool by association with the Mustang.
But if we forget Mustangs and safety concerns and just compare the Pinto to the Falcon, the Pinto was a much better, more practical, more interesting, and more fun-to-drive car.
I REMEMBER WATCHING THIS EPISODE AS A KID. I guess the trauma of seeing a car blown up was a transformational moment. “The suitcase, Angel, the suitcase!”
Also, Kelly wasn’t the only Mustang II enthusiast at the Townsend Detective Agency. Jill drove a Cobra II hatchback, though I acknowledge I was probably the only viewer looking at her car.
I cannot find the reference, but I remember watching Walker Texas Ranger with my Mom as a kid and they totally did this as well, but with SN95s. The one driving around was an 04ish, and the one they blew up was a 94ish. They didn’t even try to make it look newer, I saw the wrong tail lights and thought it was hilarious.
I love this article. Everything about it is amazing.
I was born in 81. I think the 70s musta been a ton of fun
Everyone I talk to who lived through them says they were. It was the drugs.
I was there. No it wasn’t.
Probably a 6 cylinder bare-bones clapped out daily driver. No big loss.
I agree. I remember growing up in the Midwest in the 70s and seeing many Mustangs rusted out that were less 10 years old.
Of course, this show was in Southern California so their crop of cars were presumably in better condition.
“many Mustangs rusted out that were less 10 years old.”
Back then, most cars would be ready for the scrap yard by the time they were 8-10 years old.
Hell… my dad had late 1960s VW Squareback he bought new and after 3 years, the floor had rust holes and needed repairing.
Many people who wax nostalgic for old cars don’t realize how much worse they are in every way in stock form compared to modern cars.
Cabt we have the humane seal on movie/tv, but, you know, for cars? I HATE seeing a cool car getting wrecked for no good reason (especially now that there’s CGI!)
The Col says Farrah was the “tastiest” of all the Angels.
And had the brightest headlights…
nah, in 3rd grade, i stanned for Kelly. decided i didn’t like Stingrays, because every other boy in my class was into Jill. Poor Sabrina didn’t have any fans, which looking at promo pictures now (had to look up her name), yeah 8 year old me was an idiot.
There was a similar article on Jello Picnic some years ago about a Chevy Malibu standing in to save a Chevy SS from being destroyed. (Can’t remember what show or movie, sorry). I appreciated this – the SS of course was a badge engineered Holden VF Commodore, a car I’m rather fond of whereas I thought the Malibu was a steaming pile of manure.
That was the CHiPs movie with Dax Shepard! I remember noticing that and being happy they didn’t blow up the SS
The prop master was lazy, because I’m sure there were more than a few 1974 and 1975 Mustang IIs in the junkyards of Southern California that had one good side and a whole lot of damage that could be hidden with the right camera angle. These cars had youth appeal, and between a drinking age set at 18 and pretty lax drunk-driving enforcement, there would have been a steady flow of cute coupe corpses out there. Continuity was not nearly as big a deal back then, though.
First-gen Mustangs were already popular by the mid-’70s, if I remember correctly, but they were by no means considered investment grade like they are now. (My dad got my mother a ’67 six-cylinder coupe as an “economy car,” and she always like the “sporty feel” of a floor shifter – something she never got to experience again through the mid-sized and full-sized Oldsmobiles she piloted through the rest of the ’70s and ’80s, the ’92 Town Car she got for Christmas 1993, and the 2003 Grand Marquis that replaced it after a friend following them to a party rear-ended them. That thought makes me kind of sad.)
Eh, in the mid 70s, only the 60s Stangs with V8s were popular, but not with collectors. They were popular with high school kids wanting cheap HP, just like Fox-bodies were in the oughts. As others have said, these two sacrificial Stangs were probably I6s and both were notch-backs, the absolute least favored Stangs of the time.
As for using written-off IIs, in the mid-70s cars were much simpler and cheaper to fix, so the level of damage needed for insurance to write them off was higher. Despite what we think about them today, the IIs were very popular when new, so they would have been fixed if possible. In addition, I would think that TV crews preferred running cars to make it easier to move them around and park them in the right spot. Even if they used empty shells of cars without engines, they needed it to be pushable into the right location. A heavily damaged car would be harder to do that.
Yeah, I remember reading where one of GM’s assembly plants flooded in the late ’60s, few hundred cars in the holding lots were underwater to the roof, they just ripped out and replaced the interiors, changed the fluids, and sent them out to dealers, today, they’d have all been crushed
I have to say, I’m surprised at how good the II’s taillights look on a ’64-66 rear panel. I wonder if anyone ever did that as a custom touch, all wired up to work including the amber blinkers?
me too. I don’t hate it, and it would be kinda funny to do one up this way.
The Mustang didn’t take too much longer to be appreciated, as early as 1978/1979, Harry Shay was talking about doing a production run of fiberglass 1965 replicas as one of his future products (after the Model A, Thunderbird, ’30 Ford, ’32 Ford, ’36 Ford, ’37 Ford, and ’40 Lincoln, the plan was to have two replicas in production at a time and build 10,000 of each, so, I guess, the original hope was to get around to doing the Mustang replica somewhere around 1984/1985). Of course, ultimately, the company went bust after building 5,000 Model A replicas and a little over 100 Thunderbirds, and never got around to any of the others.
I got to drive one of those Pinto-powered Shay Model A’s a number of years ago. Fun car! I wish he had found a bit more success.
I’m waiting for Jason to get to “Fall Guy” so he can explain what a dick Colt Seevers was to his friends by repeatedly destroying their cars while his truck never receives a scratch.
At least in Hardcastle and McCormick, the Judge only trashes his own cars and leaves the Coyote X alone. I’m pretty sure he nearly totaled his ’63 Vette a few times by jumping it, driving it through doors, architectural objects, etc.
Yep. Who knew fiberglass was so strong?
No kidding – that episode where he ends up destroying Howie’s new truck was brutal.
That was such a traumatizing episode.
I’m pretty sure the DSM-4.i defines it “being obsessed with looking at the back ends of vehicles”. 🙂
A whole piece about exploding Fords and not even a single joke about Sabrina’s (Kate Jackson) Pinto hatchback?! It did have the best (plaid) seats.
Re the point about the future value of cars, back in the ’80s and ’90s, you could barely give away old supercars (now muscle cars) beyond the most desirable stuff (GTOs, etc.).
True. I could have had a Hemi Cuda for 3 grand back in 1982. But 1, it was rusty, and 2, I didn’t have 3 grand.
I’ve always enjoyed how even by the early 2000s, they were still thought of as just redneck cars. This odd but common view was perhaps best summed up onscreen by having a hapless janitor drive a freakin’ Daytona in Joe Dirt.
I went to HS in the early ’90s and hardtop early Mustangs were just above completely part-time job self-funded student prices and even a hardtop with a V8 was looked upon almost as dismissively as if they had an I6 and an auto. One wallpaper guy had a ’69 or so hardtop I think was also an auto 6 (though definitely a base model, even if it was an 8) in orange that he annoyingly called the General Lee. He wasn’t a car guy (obviously), he just seemed to think it made him cool, but he was still a wallpaper guy. My friend had a ’68 396SS Chevelle fully restored by him and his father (who did it for a living) and it was appraised and insured for just $6k.
Ahh yes, another reminder of the 1970 Dodge Challenger with a 340 I decided not to buy in ’92 for $500. Kind of rough, but ran and drove and was easily restorable. Just wasn’t what I was into.
Seems like the logical thing to do would be to blow up a few dozen Mustang IIs to get their value up.
As for the original Mustang sacrifice in “Charlie’s Angels,” in the immortal words of Billy Sol Hurok, it “blow’d up good, blow’d up real good.”
OTOH the wise folks who made the original ‘Vanishing Point’ done blowed up a Camaro in the end scene* rather than destroying an actual Challenger, which I appreciate.
* sorry for the spoiler
It kills me that you have to specify “original. I’m still appalled it was redone, IIRC as a glorified made-for-tv movie.
Kowalski lives!
OMG! I never heard of this! And it stars Aragorn?!?
The Autopian staff should do an MST3K-style showing of this.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120430/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2
It’s got that vibe of ’90s remakes where they basically kept just the broad trappings of the original (compared to the ’10s thing where they go out of their way to show their faithfulness to the source material, burying tons of easter eggs, etc.)
We could also have showings of the CHiPs ’90s tv movie maybe…