Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968)
Director: Ken Hughes
Stars: Dick Van Dyke, Sally Ann Howes, Lionel Jeffries
The car was designed by famous production designer Ken Adam, who is best known for his work on the early James Bond films and Dr. Strangelove (1964), and cartoonist and sculptor Frederick Rowland Emett. A clear effort was made to make this flying car more fanciful than MacMurray’s flying Model T. The designers took advantage of the fact that, while The Absent Minded Professor was a black-and-white film, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was to be filmed in Technicolor. The car’s wheels and upholstery were made an eye-catching crimson red. Prominent were the car’s wavy-edged wings, across which were painted with red and yellow stripes. Other trappings included flotation devices and propellers that were deployed as needed. Surprisingly, though, the car does not appear much in the film and the traveling matte effects are embarrassingly inferior to Mattey and Lycett’s effects in The Absent Minded Professor. This is a particular disappointment because the special effects were supervised by the well-respected John Stears, who had won an Academy Award for his work on Thunderball (1965) and later won his second Academy Award for his work on Star Wars (1977), as has explained (). The scene shown gives the spectator the effect of falling to their death when the car is driven of a cliff, but the wings pop out and the ride turns into a journey in the sky.
