I was recently watching the movie Clueless with my girlfriend and, man, I freakin’ love that film. The main character, Cher — played by the inimitable Alicia Silverstone — is so kind and thoughtful and likable while at the same time being totally aloof. And it’s a great flick if you want to see some of your favorite actors as kids — actors like Donald Faison, Paul Rudd, Stacey Dash, the late Brittany Murphy, and on and on — and it’s also a great movie for Jeep YJ fans, because it prominently features a white 1994 Jeep Wrangler. Sadly, right out of the gate, the movie makes a boneheaded mistake.
In the clip below at about 2:06, 18-year-old Cher acts as narrator to introduce the viewer to her life. “Did I show you the loc’d-out Jeep daddy got me? It’s got four-wheel drive, dual side airbags, and a monster sound system!” she squeaks.
She then admits she doesn’t have a license and hilariously decimates a potted plant on the side of the road.
But don’t let that hilarity distract you from that obvious error you just heard. Let’s ignore the term “loc’d-out,” because that’s not a thing and was never a thing (OK, apparently in the rap scene it was for a bit, and my friend from the Valleys says it was there, as well). Let’s instead focus on the features Cher claimed her Jeep had. Four-wheel drive? Yes, the Jeep had that. A monster sound system? Definitely not from the factory, but if you look closely at the YJ in the movie, you can see that the vehicle has been retrofitted with some huge speakers on the “Family-style” roll cage that became standard in 1992:
The error that bothers me so much is Cher’s claim that the Jeep has “dual side airbags.” Because it’s not even remotely close to true! The 1994 Jeep Wrangler didn’t offer a single airbag. Not a passenger front airbag, not a driver front airbag, no knee airbag, no side torso airbags, no side curtain airbags — nothing, zero. That’s right: Cher, a notoriously terrible teenage driver, was putting both herself and her friend Dionne at risk driving this top-heavy, airbagless deathtrap.
In fact, Jeep Wranglers didn’t offer any airbags until 1997, when the TJ became the first Jeep ever to go from offering no airbags to offering dual front airbags:
What’s so sad is that the “dual side airbags” Cher claims her Jeep has weren’t offered until 2007, and didn’t become standard equipment until 2018! So, given that the movie debuted in 1995, this claim that a Jeep Wrangler came with dual side airbags was off by at least 11 years (2007 Wranglers came out in 2006)!
This is an egregious mistake, and one that I’m sure movie critics around the world pointed out, docking at least a full star out of five from their reviews. And I get why; it’s such a pointless blunder. Why would the writers of such an otherwise great film make such an unforced error? Why would they say the YJ Wrangler has any airbags, much less dual side ones, which were extremely rare at the time even on luxury cars? The writers could have said any number of things; they could have pointed out the Jeep’s rare chrome package, which looked awesome. They could have noted the powerful four-liter engine. They could have pointed out cruise control.
OK, I’ll admit that there aren’t a ton of luxury-ish features to mention that would have stood out, as the Jeep Wrangler YJ is rather spartan, but you can’t just make stuff up! That’s going to get you called out on a car blog 29 years later, and trust me, you do not want that
Anyway, for reading this short rant of mine, I’ll gift you with the wonderfully entertaining DMV-test clip shown above. “Should I leave a note?”
Images: Screenshots from Clueless/Paramount Pictures
The 2015 film, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., set in 1963, is head-explodingly infuriating for many reasons including these:
http://imcdb.org/vehicle_789075-Trabant-11-1990.html
http://imcdb.org/vehicle_828843-Wartburg-1000-312-1-1966.html
Those two cars, in addition to being anachronistic, engage in a surprisingly high-speed chase where they do a lot of drifting despite being front-wheel-drive with ostensibly sub-one-liter engines.
And the climax involves another maddeningly anachronistic sandrail:
http://imcdb.org/vehicle_828852-Custom-Made-Sandrail.html
http://imcdb.org/i828852.jpg
Best to pretend this film never existed (besides, one of the co-stars, Armie Hammer, has turned out to be a terrible person IRL.)
But you can drift a FWD. The technique is just different – you feign in the opposite direction of the intended drift and then snap the wheel in the direction of the intended drift.
Oh, yeah, quite true! However, they actually converted the Trabant and the Wartburg to RWD and used Hayabusa engines for the chase scene! Good grief.
I’m sure they go like snot but it seems to me that you can have a good chase with even FWD 1 liter cars.
Yeah, no argument there about FWD 1 liter (or even sub-1-liter) cars being eminently capable of good chases. Just that in the case of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. it’s pretty obvious how modified the stunt cars were for this particular chase scene: https://youtu.be/dU–rVFU45g?si=aYD6pPBfX9-mmT-I
Furthermore, the Trabant p691 didn’t come out until 1964, the car photoed has the 69+ grill, 69+ c-pillar vent, the 80+ bumper, and 82+ door handles. All could be normal for a 64 Trabant in the 1980s. Lastly, it has the small bolt pattern wheels. So it’s clearly a VW Polo engined model from 89-91 backdated
Wow, David must be serious about this girlfriend.
I wish we could post images, but I hope people are familiar with Napoleon Dynamite, because “I guess you could say things are getting pretty serious.”
For years and years, I had Bill Hader mixed up with Jon Heder in my head…
Perhaps the “dual side airbags” aren’t referencing the standard, automotive type of “air bags”, and could be innuendo for something else entirely?
Squealing tires on a dirt or gravel road!
I’ve often wondered if the sound person really doesn’t know the difference or if it is a dramatic scary car scene cue that they think the audience expects.
Even Bullitt, a relative paragon of realism, does it once!
It goes with the six hubcaps on the Charger.
I’ve also found quite a few movies and TV shows get the starter sound wrong, which is a dead giveaway the characters are not even cranking the car featured. Like a square body Suburban with a starter sound from a 4 cyl 80s Toyota.
Yes, this one is especially frustrating because the sound of spinning out or skidding on gravel is a pretty good sound, too.
Or when they don’t hold down the traction control button for the full 12 seconds required to disable the function!
Ah, always check all pages of comments!! Seriously though.
I think it sounds weirder to us now because side airbags have been a thing for decades, but those only just hit the market the same year the film came out. I imagine “dual side airbags” wouldn’t have sounded so strange at the time since airbags were still being referred to as “driver side” or “passenger side” as one or both were still optional equipment.
If a car had both it was often referred to as “dual airbags” sure, but there were a lot of cars that were only just adding the passenger side airbag, so lots of literature still said standard driver’s side or optional passenger’s side (or even standard driver’s and passenger’s side) to be explicit because it wasn’t quite the norm yet. And they often still had the full “supplemental restraint system” label attached to it too. Trucks/SUVs/vans were still years behind cars in adding them too, Chrysler had been advertising their vans had a standard “driver-side minivan airbag” in the 91-93.
Referring to it as having any airbags is still the odd thing, but it does make the point I suppose of having the latest and greatest features and a safety cushion…literally.
Dr. Dre would beg to differ. 🙂
The lyric was actually delivered by Snoop Dogg, but that’s all right; it’s at the 1:14 mark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GliyDgAGQI
Yeah, I got this wrong.
No worries!
Cher and Tai were apparently both familiar with Dre’s album ‘The Chronic’, as they make reference(s) to it later in the film at the party. I thought it [the album] was released in 1993 but it looks like it was December 1992. It became popular in ’93, though.
The first transformers movie with Shia Lebouf and whatserface. She leans under the hood of the Camaro and says something about double pumper carb, then they show the engine and its a highly custom fuel injection system, I think it might even have been ITBs, though I’m too lazy to go find out.
You are probably correct, and I remember that scene well.
I remember every detail about “whatserface”.
Although I couldn’t say whether the car even had an engine or not.
Used to wonder how that goofy chump “David Silver” could have managed to score that Fox. Knowing what we all know now, my dude seems like a very wise genetics harvester that timed his cue to exit like a champ.
It’s been some 27 (!!) years since I saw the film The Man Who Knew Too Little starring Bill Murray as a bumbling American tourist in England so I don’t recall the exact words but I was pretty bugged when the cops say something about how they can’t believe a Mini is capable of such road handling during a chase scene when the cops are pursuing Murray’s character who’s driving an early 90s Mini Cooper http://imcdb.org/vehicle_25117-Rover-Mini-Cooper-ADO20-1992.html Even as a ‘Murican in the 90s who had never been to the UK I already knew about the Mini’s legendary road handling characteristics.
My favorite part of the movie was the Mighty Mighty Bosstones at the dance.
The best way to accept this flaw in the script is this movie takes place in an alternate universe where side airbags did exist in 1995. Usually automotive issues bother me like a Harley with an Evo Engine in Captain America. The modern Sportster on the Show glow.
But other things bother me also, I worked with stage lighting so at the end of death on the nile they had 1950s style stage lights, why because they looked nice. Glow again had modern moving lights in a 1980s club. And Jessica Jones, why was there a 25k theatrical lighting board in a burnt out shitty dance club. Multiverse that the answer that helps me deal with it.
That sounds like a series of Torchinsky articles right there…
I will take that as a compliment
A terrible car mistake was the “casting” of an AMC Matador and AMC Hornet(s) in “The Man With The Golden Gun.” Despite a pretty spectacular bridge jump stunt, these had to be the two least inspiring “Bond” cars ever.
Even worse, the action scenes were set in Thailand where AMC products were not sold, despite depictions of Bond’s stealing (commandeering?) a Hornet Rally hatchback from a dealer showroom. Plus, the Thai police were shown driving Hornets. Not in the real world.
That was a rather unique case of having to work the plot around the car. The rather complex mathematics behind the speed and ramp design for the “Astro-Spiral” jump had been worked out specifically for the AMC Javelin, and was later modified for the Hornet when the Javelin went out of production. The stunt was designed at Calspan Corporation in Buffalo as an early exercise in computer modeling and first performed publicly at the Houston Astrodome in 1972.
The stunt caught the attention of long-time Bond movie producer “Cubby” Broccoli, and the stunt crew who had been touring around the country performing the jump was recruited for The Man With the Golden Gun. Then they had to tailor the script to get Bond into a Hornet, because that was the car that the ramp design had been done for. So they worked out a sponsorship deal with AMC, which is why you see the Hornet, the AMC dealership, and the villian Scaramanga’s famous flying Matador in the movie.
Yes, I knew all of that, but if you’re the producer and you liked the stunt and it required an AMC product, why not script the movie someplace that actually had AMC cars like the US, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Mexico, or Costa Rica? Instead, what they did was like scripting a scene about an AA meeting where everyone’s sitting around guzzling Jim Beam because of a sponsorship.
That’s the same movie where the camera crew is prominently visible in a shot (reflection in a mirror). I don’t think they were fretting too much about details at that point.
When the Vanishing Point Challenger turns into a Camaro at the end…
https://youtu.be/uv2S6nP3U0s
Kinda like how the Aston Martin turns into a Fiat in the original Italian Job as it plummets off a cliff
In car chases when two cars go side-by-side, the baddie would pinch the good guy’s car against the guardrail. Sparks fly and the car would invariably catch fire and explode just when the good guy barely manages to get out.
I tend to rate car errors based on a sliding scale of how prominently the car features, how egregious the error is, and whether the error adds to or distracts from the plot.
Fast and/or Furious movies: cars are the focal point, the characters are supposed to know them, but having about 22 extra shift points builds tension and excitement (also becomes a staple of the movies). Blatantly inaccurate car talk from the characters, on the other hand, does not add to the plot and can be a distraction.
Back to the Future: the car features prominently, the characters don’t have a lot of car knowledge, and it’s actually a time machine. It can have a speedometer that reads 88 mph.
Movies set in a specific year in which all the cars are from that year: it really hammers home an aesthetic, but it feels really weird to see a small town in 1965 filled with cars that would be brand new (and are often distressed as if they’d seen a decade of use). I don’t necessarily expect car knowledge, but I get annoyed that they pay so much attention to detail crafting the scene and get it wrong.
Alternate universes: special place in my heart for the weird details here. For All Mankind, for example, is set in an alternate history that prominently includes changes to technology. EVs are in use in the 80s, we’ve solved a lot of environmental and technological issues, and they still grabbed a bunch of cars that probably wouldn’t have been built in those circumstances. A Chevy Citation stood out to me. A higher-tech, wealthier America that hadn’t had a fuel crisis wouldn’t make that car (or several others shown). They carefully crafted so much of the alternate reality, so that was a distraction. But not too much of one, since the cars aren’t a primary focus.
Pretty sure only one car existed with dual side airbags in ’95, and they were a new feature that year: the Volvo 850. So, it’s amusing that the writers made that mistake, but also kind of amazing that they came up with the idea at all, as side airbags hadn’t made it to market at the time.
Those were seat bags but I guess on the side
Isn’t that exactly what side airbags are? I have never seen side airbags that don’t come out of the seats. There are side curtain airbags that are in the car, usually the pillars or roof, but the side ones are always seat mounted in my experience.
Hmm I guess so I was thinking of the pillar ones I guess those are curtain bags, I was in a picknpull and had to pull the seat out of an 850, some of the bolts were rusty so I was using my hammer powered impact driver. Fun fact those bags do not need power to go off, my poor hearing was even worse for the rest of that day
Ouch. Sounds painful.
Surprised me but I was behind the seat-
Many Mercedes and BMW mount/mounted (not sure if this has been true for the last ~20 years) the side bags in the doors, but I do think seat-mounted is far more common.
I liked that some 1994-95 Volvos got big decals on the back windows touting their “SIPS Side Impact Protection System,” which in the ’94 models, and the ’95 940s, was actually referring to the extra structural barriers added to the doors and B-pillars. Only in the ’95 850s and subsequent years/models did the system also include the (seat-mounted) side airbags.
Yeah, I feel like this is the real story, not the Jeep part at all. Very few people were aware of or interested in side impact air bags in 1995, so it’s a strange thing to brag about at all, even if you did own an 850.
Dom driving an RX-7 in the first F&F movie, and then nothing but muscle cars after that. He looks so out of place in a tuner car and I hate everything about it.
There is one mistake that car people like to bring up: the on-off supercharger on Mad Max’s last-of-the-V8s.
You know what, though? That absolutely does not bother me for two reasons:
1) As a plot device and tension-heightener and all around cool-looking and -sounding thing, it works really frickin’ well.
2) I choose to believe that the wizard mechanic in the underground (underbuilding?) lair somehow found a way to make it work.
Chuck Norris had the same setup in his Ramcharger in Lone Wolf McQuade lol
https://youtu.be/EQkyi1_l6po
There is nothing fake about that basic system at all. Using an A/C style electromagnetic clutch works. How do we know? Because Toyota freaking did from the factory! Supercharged Previas had an electromagnetic clutch on their supercharger and it only engaged under high load.
I also just discovered that the Mercedes C230 kompressor ran a clutched supercharger in the late 90s.
You do know that Mad Max was released in 1979, right? Which means it was probably filmed in 1978?
It’s disingenuous to compare the cars from ~46 years ago to more modern vehicles. You might as well say it’s a mistake that one scene shows Max reinstalling the distributor cap on his car instead of using individual coil packs.
my point is merely that it isn’t a fake tech, and it is one that could have been built using existing technologies in the late 70s. People still today argue its a fake tech, not that it would have been fake then, but that it is fake today. So I stand by my point and disagree there is anything disingenuous about it.
Not to mention that the Mercedes-Benz Model K was fitted with a clutched supercharger in 1926!
Pre-war supercharged Mercedes-Benz engines operate in exactly the same way as the Mad Max car. The “kompressor” was designed for short bursts of power only, never constant engagement.
This isn’t technically a mistake, but one that comes to mind is in the movie Boiler Room. At one point one of the characters is bragging about his Ferrari F355 and says that his transmission is “synchromesh.” It seems odd to boast about having a synchronized manual transmission in a ’90s Ferrari.
I suppose “synchromesh” sounded high tech and fancy to the jabroni who wrote that line, but it sounds ridiculous to people with even a basic knowledge of cars. I haven’t seen that movie in years but I still remember that line. If you need to write car-related dialog and are clueless, maybe ask a car enthusiast for help?
It’s a funny line because the D’Bag character is clearly just repeating something the D’Bag Ferrari salesman told him.
That is an interesting point. I never thought of it that way, but it actually makes sense in the context of a clueless Ferrari owner parroting lines from a salesman.
I still think it is likely a writer adding random fancy sounding words, but maybe not?
The Black Panther Movie from 2018 has an issue that leads me to lecturing my wife and kids every time I see it. There is a rather excellent vehicle chase scene with some Lexus’ and 4Runners somewhere in Asia (Macau???) The 4Runners are what get me every time. I will repeatedly tell everyone within earshot that 4Runners aren’t sold in that market, and those should be Prados in the movie.
This is Peak Dad. Never change.
IIRC, the baddies also have mounted machine guns in the back of those 4Runners, and fire them out the rear windows — shattering the glass.
On a 4Runner.
They installed machine guns in one of the few cars that has a roll-down rear window, and didn’t bother to roll down the window!
They do that, there is even one shot where it looks like they are trying to hit the glass near the corners to clear it out more.
I don’t know if it’s a mistake per se, but how about a deliberative misleading?
There is no way that Kid Rock’s malaise-era, 2nd gen Camaro is faster than any other car in Joe Dirt, esp. David Spade’s eventual Plymouth Belvedere GTX.
Yet until the very end (a character even points out the Camaro is a 6 cylinder), the audience is constantly lead to believe this.
That character also refers to the Camaro as having a Slant Six, which is impossible barring a stupid amount of custom butchery work that would be way harder than dropping in a V8
I think you could get a V-6 in a Firebird/Trans Am, but not a slant-six as that’s a Chrysler engine.
You absolutely could, also an Iron Duke 4 cylinder for a time, but she specifically refers to it as a “little Slant Six”
Well, I was just referring to the generation of Firebird in Joe Dirt. But no slant six, ever.
Trans Am, not Camaro.
It had the decal even, didn’t it… 🙂
Yep. But it just occurred to me that a Trans Am and a Firebird were the same car.
It’s not one I’ve seen, but that new movie Love Lies Bleeding is supposed to be set in 1989 but practically every vehicle prominently featured is from 2000 or later. That seems like a pretty major goof, if you ask me.
I tried watching it the other night. I only lasted 20 minutes, and I don’t mean “lasted” because of the boobs. It’s not good.
Danger to manifold
Several years ago, Blipshift had some excellent stickers that replicated that error message.
Yes, I bought a bunch. 🙂
How about the 1989 classic Collision Course, where the John DeLorean expy character invents a revolutionary new turbocharger that can be easily installed with just a few bolts onto any engine in any car and immediately make that car capable of supercar-rivaling performance, even if it was, say, a rental spec Toyota Corolla?
(It also starred Pat Morita, and Johnny Carson’s secondary host Jay Leno, whatever happened to that guy, anyway? Did his career go anywhere after that movie?)
I heard that movie was so bad it put Mr. Leno off cars forever.
Last I heard, he’d gotten kinda fired up about them.
Boom, roasted
Let’s get this head-cannon straightened out and chalk it up to a fibbing dealer trying to get a protective parent to buy their child a deathtrap.
It’s infinitely less infuriating than the unnecessary and inaccurate V8 sounds practically every show or movie insists on laying over driving scenes.
The Redtailed Hawk would like to have a word with you about not being on the credit roll any time a Bald Eagle shows up.
Ah, Cher’s dad most likely was the one who bought the Jeep and since he was a perspicacious lawyer it’s doubtful that he would’ve fallen prey to fibbing dealers. This just seems more a case of screenwriters simply throwing in stuff (cf. how the writers for the various Star Trek shows would put in placeholders [usually the word “tech”] in scripts and have consultants go back and fill in with sciencey-sounding stuff: https://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/10/13/teching-the-tech/)
Not most likely. Definitely. She says her father bought it in the opening sentence.
He might have been a lawyer but that doesn’t mean he knew cars.
Yeah, no, not all lawyers would know something about cars…but the film portrays Cher’s dad as having gotten where he is, with the big house in Beverly Hills and all, by being a pretty sharp lawyer (he’s not ever shown to have any, uh, sleaziness like being a corrupt mob lawyer so it’s reasonable to make assumptions about him simply being a sharp lawyer) so the most likely scenario is that it was the writers who didn’t know much about cars so they put in a placeholder (something like “line about latest and fanciest automotive features”) and didn’t completely vet the final line. In another comment I referenced the phenomenon of Star Trek writers using “tech” placeholders and then later having consultants fill in sciencey-sounding stuff. And there’s a pretty hilarious running gag in the 2021 film Free Guy, with Ryan Reynolds, about a video game character named Dude that was released into the video game before the developers had finished the character so Dude will say things like “Catchphrase” instead of an actual catchphrase and “Adjective!” instead of something like “Awesome!”
“he’s not ever shown to have any, uh, sleaziness like being a corrupt mob lawyer so it’s reasonable to make assumptions about him simply being a sharp lawyer”
“I got a .45 and a shovel. I doubt anyone would miss you.”
Sounds mob to me.
Okay. It’s been a few years since I last saw the film. What I do remember is how they showed some of the nuts and bolts of litigation like with Paul Rudd’s character and Cher helping her dad with some of the tedious paperwork, something not usually associated with mob lawyers as typically portrayed in Hollywood. And I do remember Paul Rudd’s character being shown as a pretty conscientious sort (so not likely to consort with mob lawyers) which served as a catalyst for Cher’s epiphany about her personal motives. Yeah, guess it’s time for a rewatch of that film; besides, it’s indeed a film worthwhile rewatching…
Maybe he inherited his money.
+1 to this. I believe the secret hollywood sound editor guide states “No matter what engine the car has, you shall use a V8 audio clip for the exhaust. Unless of course the car actually has a V8, then you may consider using a non-V8 audio source”
it tracks for me that Cher would believe whatever she was told about the Jeep, and be able to tell if it actually had airbags short of getting in an accident
True!
Yeah, I always sort of assumed that both the airbags and the sound system (those big speakers still don’t look like a great sound system to me) were indicative of her, well, cluelessness, and were not supposed to be accurate to her Jeep. Sure, a lot of the audience might not have noticed, but writers like to be clever with these sort of easily-verifiable in-character errors.
Those are Bose 101 Outdoor Speakers, Man.
They’re top of the line.
That seems correct for the movie. Install some top-of-the-line outdoor speakers and do nothing else to improve the sound system, since it’s more about the appearance of wealth than sound quality.
It’s almost as if she… lacked clues or something 🙂