The New Fantasticar Is A Great Design Inspired By Mid-Century Turbine Concept Cars

I think it’s safe to say that most attempts to bring the long-running gamma-ray-enhanced superhero family, the Fantastic Four, to the big screen have been, well, troubled. The 2005, 2007, and 2015 attempts were all, charitably, kind of crappy, but this most recent version actually seems promising. I’ve not seen it yet, but I have seen the trailer, and, more specifically, the fantastical car that’s known as the Fantasticar, and that’s what interests me most. So let’s talk about that.

Aesthetically, the new Fantastic Four:Something Something movie seems to take place in an alternate-universe version of 1960s America, and from what I can see, the look of everything is wonderful, with a design vocabulary that seems very well grounded in 1960s design concepts and themes, just pushed a bit further than what our reality managed.

But I should show rather than just tell, since I have all these visual resources at my command. This isn’t a newspaper, after all. So here, check out the trailer, why not:

See what I mean? The design seems quite rooted in the 1960s, and, generally, the technology sort of does as well. That part is a bit tricky, as it’s technology clearly far beyond what we had available back then, or, in many areas, even now. I suppose what they really did is skin hyper-advanced technology like energy storage and hovering and freaking spacecraft in a skin of the 1960s-ish user-facing components.

What I mean by this is the underlying tech is clearly far beyond reality’s 1960s, but the filmmakers have used 1960s-style switches and buttons and cathode ray tube displays and other things you actually see and touch and interact with. This way, things have a 1960s feel without being restricted by the grim realities of the actual 1960s. And the Fantastic Four’s car, the somewhat uncreatively-named Fantasticar, fits completely into this aesthetic/conceptual framework. Just look at the dashboard to see what I’m getting at:

See all those toggle switches and CRT displays and analog gauges and big, chunky knobs? They’re obscuring the fact that the underlying (if fictional) tech is far more advanced than our present-day cars with their gleaming flat full-color touchscreens.

It’s worth noting that the Fantasticar has quite a long history, first appearing way back in 1962, in the third issue of Fantastic Four, where it had a much more, um, bathtub-with-headlights sort of look:

Also, I do have to say that I think the use of the word “colorful” when talking about the Fantastic Four costumes may be a bit of hyperbole, unless by “colorful” they mean “full of basically one color, blue.”

There were updates to the Fantasticar over the years, though almost all of them seemed to insist on not having a roof or windshield, which seems a bad idea for something that flew around at supersonic speeds. How did they talk to each other in there? Weren’t they cold? What about if it rained? Why were they so against having a damn roof?

Happily for the ficttional fantastic family, this latest iteration appears to have a fully enclosed passenger compartment. As the name suggests, it’s a four seater, though somewhat unusually those seats appear to be in a diamond formation as opposed to two rows of two:

I’d also like to note, with some glee, that the Fantasticar only appears to have lap belts, which is an extremely 1960s touch. I bet they didn’t even bother to use them most of the time.

From what I can see in the trailer, the automotive design overall seems very well considered, with a mix of what look like real-world cars and alternate-reality ones. For example, here it looks like there’s what may be a ’65-ish white Chrysler 300 next to a mustard-colored imaginary car that feels a bit like a cross between a Panhard and an NSU:

That maroon car feels also a bit Panhard-ish in overall shape, but has some really exuberant American-style fins and bullet-style taillights there. And then there’s that Peel Trident-like microcar up there!

Let’s zoom in for a closer look at that microcar:

Oh yeah, that’s the stuff. This is the future we should have had. It looks like it’d be like driving a giant gumball machine, and it’s hard to find anything I don’t like about that.

I’m getting off-track, though. We’re here to talk about the Fantasticar, whose taillights I’m starting to think are actually exhaust ports, and not just taillights meant to resemble jet exhaust ports. If you have exhaust ports that generate a red light and get brighter when stopping or blink when turning, can they do double-duty as taillights? Would that be legal? Maybe the movie will go into just that, in an exciting 41-minute discussion of alternate-reality FMVSS regulations.

Right, the Fantasticar! Let’s look at the overall design of this thing:

I love it, personally. Especially those L-shaped front indicators on that lower fin-thing there, and the concentric-circle pattern grille. That front end and overall look of this thing feel a bit familiar, and while I haven’t heard anyone who worked on the film’s design overtly say this, I suspect the basic design concepts were taken from a few turbine car concept cars from the late 1950s and into the 1960s. The most famous of these is likely Chrysler’s Turbine Car from 1963-1964:

There’s some clear references and similarities there, especially in the front end treatment, but I think the design inspirations actually go a bit further back, to the concept cars that defined the look of the Chrysler Turbine car. Before the Turbine Car, Chrysler had another turbine-based concept, called the Typhoon, from 1963:

As you can see, the Typhoon’s styling was a bit more exuberant and removed from mainstream auto design than the Turbine Car, and I think you can see even more inspiration for the Fantasticar here. The Typhoon was designed by Charles Mashigan under the design direction of Elwood Engel, who Chrysler had poached from Ford. And it was a car from Engel’s time at Ford that I think provided the real basis for the Fantasticar’s design inspiration: the 1958 La Galaxie show car:

The La Galaxie was intended to be a hint at upcoming Thunderbird styling ideas, but it also ended up becoming the seeds of what would become Chrysler’s turbine concept cars when Engel jumped ship. All of the crucial elements are there: the round, jet-intake-style headlights with the narrow, straight grille bridging them; long, sleek, pontoon-like sides that bow out up on top and cut inward as they drop; the semi bubble-top canopy, the wide and long and low proportions – while not all of these made it into the later Chrysler Turbine cars, almost all of these elements ended up in the Fantasticar.

The Fantasticar has a fastback design as opposed to the La Galaxie’s notchback, but there’s a lot of similarities between the two vehicles, each fantastic in their own ways. But I think it’s in profile where the designs diverge the most:

Even so, there’s definitely proportional and stylistic parallels here, even if they’re mixed around a bit, like which wheel is skirted or not.

There’s definitely a lot of Turbine Car/Typhoon/La Galaxie in this latest Fantasticar, and I think those are all ideal choices for inspiration for such a machine. Now I’m excited to see this movie, if only for the cars, which is pretty much a major reason I go see any movie, if I’m honest. Maybe that’s why I was so disappointed with Gladiator II.