I think by now we’ve all glumly accepted that a good portion of our entertainment diet is made up of reconstituted ideas. I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes these old idea reboots work well, like that rebooted Battlestar Galactica did in the mid-2000s. Often, they’re just absolute garbage, like the Knight Rider (not to be confused with defunct media company Knight Ridder) attempted reboot in 2008. NBC seems especially fond of these, and recently showed a trailer for their latest attempted reboot, this time based on the old Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell-starring time travel show, Quantum Leap. The trailer seems fine for what it is, at least if you’re willing to ignore what may be the most ridiculously terrible attempt to show what a manual transmission looks like in all of modern television. It’s bad.
[ED Note: Battlestar Galactica was great for two seasons and then utterly jumped the shark, so I’m not sure I give it a full pass. – MH]
I was alerted to this nightmare via a tweet from Friend of The Autopian Charles Brand, but I don’t want to show you the tweet here, because it’ll be more fun if you watch the trailer first and can spot it for yourself. I’m pretty sure that if you’re on this site, you won’t be able to miss it:
https://youtu.be/G3I0SpwjVK8
Holy shit, right? What the hell is that?
Okay, in case you missed it, somehow, here’s a couple of screengrabs of the shifter as seen in the trailer, stitched together so the whole thing is visible:
The fuck am I even looking at here? What has a shift pattern like that? The only car that comes to mind that used this sort of double-handled-trident shift pattern with a gate would be an oh, lemme think, oh yeah, a 1977 Imagino Unreal GT, an incredible, fast V7-powered grand tourer from fucking Narnia that doesn’t fucking exist, because nothing uses a shift pattern like this, especially a 1983 Ford Econoline as seen in that clip.
Sure, there’s cars with unusual shift patterns out there, like early Porsche 911 five-speeds with that dogleg first gear, or the crazy Citroën 2CV umbrella-handle shifter, but nothing like whatever the hell this is, which would require you to move the shifter down and to the left and then down again to go from first to second, an act as unfamiliar to human arms as feeding yourself with a hand that goes up and over your head and in front of your eyes.
Also, a square-section shift lever? Have you ever driven a car with one of those? Ever? Okay, maybe if you have a Peterbilt with an aftermarket shift lever, or some other aftermarket thing. But I’m still going to wager it’s nothing like what’s in that picture.
Just to put this all in context, the main character is someone that time-travels into the bodies of various people across time in order to right some sort of wrongs or get people to bone or stop historic missteps or whatever. In this trailer, it appears that the main guy has been sent to 1985. I know this because there’s a shot of a theater marquee that shows this:
…and a quick Google search told me that both those films were released in June of 1985. Also, some other sign says so.
The van he’s time-teleported or whatever into is a 1983 or 1984 Ford Econoline, which I’m pretty sure of because 1983 was the first year Ford used the blue oval badge in the center of the grille instead of chrome F O R D letters on the hood. For reference, here’s the Econoline in the trailer:
…and here’s a 1983 Econoline in Club Wagon trim, with a similar paint scheme to the van in the trailer:
Now, a manual Econoline is a rare beast; the vast majority came with automatics, and a stick shift one is rare enough that I actually wrote about how shocked I was to see one for sale back in 2017. You’re statistically more likely to meet a glassblower who owns corgis and thinks you’re sexy than you are to encounter a manual Ford Econoline.
I guess part of the plot here is that the main scientist, who seems to be from our year of the lord 2022, goes back in time to the 1980s and, ha ha, he can’t drive stick, and yet he must, as he seems to have jumped into the body of a getaway driver behind the wheel of a vanishingly rare manual Econoline. So that’s why they had to make this Econoline into a manual. I get that. What I don’t get is why they prop team did it so badly.
It’s not just that it doesn’t look like an Econoline stick shift setup, as seen above there, because that barely matters: Those are so rare almost nobody really knows what an Econoline manual shifter looks like. The problem is that it doesn’t look like any manual transmission setup at all, period.
Whoever made this seems to have never actually seen a manual transmission, but perhaps had it described to them over the phone, poorly. And then they made more work for themselves. The shifter didn’t have to be gated, because not only is that more work, it’s the root cause of the problem here (that wildly implausible shift pattern), and no workhorse van has a gated shifter.
Why did they bother to make this thing at all? Why did they cut that plastic (maybe metal?) shift gate and make a sticker with the gear numbers on it and put a foam sheet inside it and screw on a bezel with hex-head screws and shove that square-section tube in there like it was a gearshift, when they could have taken a trip to a junkyard, gotten literally any manual transmission shifter from any car, and had that work a billion times better by just plopping it on the floor?
Or maybe they could have just picked some period-correct van that did have a manual shifter? How hard would it have been to get, say, a 1982 Volkswagen Vanagon, for example? Not hard at all. Plenty of those were manuals.
Let’s look at it again:
It makes no sense. It looks like absolute crap, it’s inaccurate to the point of distracting the viewer from the narrative and it was much, much more work than just yanking a real shifter from something.
I reached out to a friend who has done movie prop work, and she was baffled, too. The best answer she could give was that it may have been a last-minute, rush request, and the sloppy, inaccurate work was just the result of it being a rush job. Of course this happens sometimes, but for such a pivotal prop, one that gets some direct focus by the camera and attention, and is a crucial part of the plot, this seems like a huge oversight.
I mean, this same trailer has effects like this:
I’m certain the props team is more talented and capable than this fake shifter shows, but damn.
Nobody caught this in editing or review? How is that possible? Or, more likely, whoever was reviewing this footage either didn’t know what a manual shifter looked like themselves or just didn’t think it was a big deal, figuring it’s close enough, and who gives a shit? Everyone knows what it’s supposed to be, right?
Well, maybe, but there are those of us out there – not an insignificant number – who do know what a stick shift looks like. Saying something this obviously inaccurate is just fine would be like if the script called for a banana, and the props department delivered something that looked like this:
I mean, that’s basically like a banana, it’s generally the right color and texture and has some parts of the shape right, if not everything, but the viewer will know what you mean, right? Is that not close enough?
I think we all know it’s not close enough. Because while it may have some similarities, it’s not a fucking banana. Just like that shifter isn’t a fucking manual transmission shifter.
Details matter. Especially when there’s no reason for the details to be wrong in the first place. The way shifters look isn’t a secret, and real ones aren’t hard to find, after all.
Maybe there’s some complex plot point I’m missing here, like he was sent not just back in time, but they changed the premise of the show so he get sent into alternate universes, and this one is just like ours, except manual transmissions have awkward, stupid patterns and levers with corners.
If that’s the case, my apologies to everyone who worked on this production. You’ve done a bang-up job.
Quite the scandal Jason has uncovered – “Shiftergate”!
Sorry to be that guy, but those aren’t hex head screws, those are button head screws. The adjective in front of head refers to the shape of the head, not the drive. For a hex head, the shape is a hex, which also ends up being the drive method, so something you would use a regular socket on. A button head refers the head shape being a button, but the drive can be internal hex (a.k.a. Allen), internal torx, internal torx plus, etc.
I’m pretty sure their only source material for how a manual shifter works and looks is some Fast and Furious scene.
“Hey props guy, here’s a shoebox full of junk. You’ve got 20 minutes to turn it into a manual gear shift!”
The real issue is not that no actual car has such a shift pattern. The problem is that it doesn’t work.
You mention the “crazy” umbrella-handle shift on a 2CV. That pattern may be unusual, but it it’s not crazy at all. It is very useful. The two pairs of gears you alternate between the most (R and 1, and 2 and 3) while managing a parking situation or driving through a city, each have only a straight hand motion between them. Very handy.
But this? This tries to get you to shift R-2-1-4-3.
So… what if this is an alternate reality where that is the normal shifter pattern? Or maybe they did this to make us who know how to use a manual shifter feel for the character who is suddenly in a situation where the manual transmission doesn’t make sense, and therefore can’t operate it easily?
Yeah, weird prop, whatever. I’m here to pick a bone with calling out the Porsche 901 transmission shift pattern. This is the second reference I have seen to it recently. Having spent several years of my youth with one in a 914, it was a great pattern. With so little power, a lot of time in traffic was going back and forth between 2nd and 3rd. The shiter did it by itself with barely a touch. I miss that gearbox.
It as if the props department was told what a shift pattern looked like as opposed to actually seeing one.
I don’t know if there’s a Dean Stockwell -type character in this but it occurs to me that Henry Winkler would have been perfect.
Dude, my Renault Alliance had that shift pattern. Reverse and third were at the extreme corners, 1st was somewhere in the middle. Two and four were down middle-ish and it was a crap shoot what you got. At least that’s how it was when I had it with a billion miles on it and completely worn out shift linkage bushings.. Shifting that transmission was like stirring a pot of noodles with a wooden spoon.
There was absolutely no-one on the planet that could drive it besides me.
-Matt
He says, “I can’t drive a stick.”
She says, “How could I ever love such a dweeb? You’re on your own.”
Oh Boy.
“Whoever made this seems to have never actually seen a manual transmission, but perhaps had it described to them over the phone, poorly.”
I promise you this is almost exactly what happened, only the conversation happened in a text message and ended with Google. I know I’m going to sound like a cranky Gen Xer, but I refuse to betray my generation: A Millennial told a GenZer in the prop room to make a stick shift, then props Googled “stick shift” and saw a bunch of grated shifters. Considering Jaxon nor his slightly senior Paddox has ever personally seen a stick shift, let alone used one, neither understood that in every instance – even in a Trabant – there’s some intuitive logic behind the numerical patterns.
Considering how few under 30 have ever seen a manual transmission, I’m genuinely impressed the numbers aren’t positioned horizontally. Anyone in the editing room was likely as clueless. The flub could have been caught by one of the EPs during a screening, but those dinosaurs are still driving an SEL with stale blow on the steering wheel leftover from the premier of Three’s a Crowd.
Now, just to argue with myself, considering how much of their target audience won’t understand manual transmissions, I do understand why the faux shifter was gated. Even though it’s rare, it’s what most people recognize whether they’ve driven a manual or not. The pattern is stamped on most shifters and practically an emoji. I’m not sure how a short-ish, gated shifter would even work in an Econoline, but the three foot tall shifters used in most utilitarian vans and busses would have been just as distracting to viewers under 30 as this ridiculous concoction is to us ancient manual purists.
My 1978 manual Econoline had a 3 speed column shift and no gear markings, just muscle memory.
Gonna go right back to not knowing this exists.
My parents had a 4-speed manual 1983 club wagon, tan on beige–like a shade lighter than the one in the ad picture. The thing I remember most about it was that it was the first car I’d seen with intermittent wipers, and we all thought my dad was fucking with us when he turned them on the first time.
I’ve always found it amazing how much southeastern Pennsylvania looks like southern California
Love how we’re all bitching about the shifter (and I get it, that 2-3 upshift looks _tricky_) and skipping over the PALM TREES IN PHILLY.
Someone mentioned a tractor transmission – I was thinking of something similar. I think that they pulled this thing off of something designed to shift between different operating modes where the gate pattern is deliberately creating a break between positions. In other words, this is a condition where you wouldn’t want to push directly from one mode to the another. Still, ridiculous to pretend it’s a real van transmission.
Brought to you by the same people who think computers in TV shows still need to make annoying beeping and buzzing sound effects whenever anything on the screen is touched, because audiences aren’t sufficiently familiar with computers to be able to recognize when they’re doing stuff
// Sometimes these old idea reboots work well, like that rebooted Battlestar Galactica did in the mid-2000s. Often, they’re just absolute garbage, like the Knight Rider (not to be confused with defunct media company Knight Ridder) attempted reboot in 2008.
As an aside, we can thank the dumpster fire that was 2008 Knight Rider for the non-existence of the first attempt to bring Top Gear to our shores:
I edited the original pilot, starring Adam Carolla, Tanner Foust, and Eric Stromer. It was great! But then Knight Rider aired first, completely shit the bed, and all the suits at NBC thought “oh no! we can’t do cars shows anymore! cars BAD!” and they torpedoed TGUSA for NBC. Back into development hell it went, until History Channel picked up the mantle, and.. uh.. well.. the rest is history. Sorry for that pun.
TORCH: you know what you have on a flash drive, given to you by ME at a Jal**nik party many years ago. Go ahead and post the sucker, video footage and all. Its been long enough.
Good work Jason. We need hard-hitting journalism to expose this crap. If those Quantum Leap producers continue to hire the set crew from LA’s Virgil middle school play production team, then they should get Torched. Alas, consider themselves forewarned!!
(No offense to those hard working 7th and 8th graders working their tails off making props though).
Well, after this I don’t care at all if Sam gets home.
https://www.summitracing.com/parts/oer-3921147w?seid=srese1&gclid=CjwKCAjw1ICZBhAzEiwAFfvFhCjHolY21tam3g4XJugNkEtYYO3VGxYs3Js3l2kR8qTTg1Dk3C23axoCGusQAvD_BwE
jeez Torch, I was thinking maybe Mercedes wrote this, owe it to her penchant for crappy euro and jap manual trans cars, but you are old enough to have at least rode with someone with a standard American 4 speed. that patter, while odd that it is offset a bit is actually exactly the way all but my 6 speed challenger in my harem. 71 scout, 68 camaro, 85 CJ7.
Dude, I know what a regular H-pattern shifter is. All my cars have those. But nothing has a pattern with jogs from 1 ->2 like that. It’s not an H-pattern, even if the gears are in the same locations. This is a very different thing.
I mean, I’ve had cars that FELT like that was what the shift pattern was, but two of them were from British Leyland, and one was French.
So are old VW 4-speed shift patterns really slanted, as shown here? https://www.jbugs.com/product/111-0000.html
The show is filmed in Vancouver, so maybe that’s a Canadian Econoline shifter lol…
Torch’s insanity, in all it’s forms, is a delight but my favorite flavor, by far, is incredulous raging.
This had to be someone that searched “old Ford transmission” and ended up in tractor land, then applied a second layer of interpretation.
Here’s a 4 and 5 speed, for the record. Figuring out which is worse if you put them in a car might give you an aneurysm.
https://photos.yesterdaystractors.com/gallery/uptest/a179369.jpg
https://photos.yesterdaystractors.com/gallery/uptest/a179366.jpg