04 Aug 05
August is going to a big month for car-loving film buffs. Not only has that fun-loving VW Beetle, Herbie The Love Bug, returned to the big screen after a 25-year holiday in the film Herbie: Fully Loaded, but the infamous General Lee is set to jump, wheelspin and barrel-roll its way into cinemas in the Hollwood remake of the Dukes Of Hazzard. As Bo and Luke Duke would say, we'll be in Hogg heaven.
For George Barris, the Chicago-born 'King of Kustoms', it's about much more than watching a few car chases down your local Odeon. It's a chance to watch two of his most famous creations come back to life. Like virtually every other four-wheeled icon to hit the silver screen since the 1940s, Herbie and the General Lee came out of Barris's modest-looking workshop in Hollywood, California.
George's obsession with customising cars started at the tender age of 13, when his father gave him and his brother a knackered 1925 Buick to play with. "There wasn't any customising scene back then," he recalls, "so we'd go down to the hardware store and buy pots and pans to use as wheelcaps, and housepaint to put on the car. One time we pulled the doorknobs off the kitchen cabinets and fitted them to the grille. Boy, was our Mom pissed [off] when she got home."
She'd be proud of him now, though. Since then, Barris has gone on to conceive and build some of the most celebrated action heroes of all time. The original Batmobile, Knight Rider's K.I.T.T., Starsky and Hutch's Gran Torino, the Ecto 1 ambulance from Ghostbusters, the A-Team van - the list goes on. And on. And on.
