“Everybody relax: I found the car,” he says, pulling up in a grey-primered old 1950s relic, “Needs some suspension work and shocks. When Dan Aykroyd's Ray Stantz first brings home a stray, the Ghostbusters aren't too sure about it. They have yet to contact the studio.Photos courtesy of studios. The petition has 11,169 signatures to date and the group is working on a proposal to submit to Sony, outlining how the vehicle would be restored, who would own the vehicle and how the vehicle would be used. “It was like he was seeing an old friend.”Īs for ECTO-1A, a group of “Ghostbusters” fans from the website began a petition in October to purchase the dilapidated car from Sony. “The most rewarding part was seeing it finished and seeing the look on Dan Aykroyd’s face when he came to see it finished,” Claridge said. One of the more challenging aspects of the refurbishment, which took about nine months, was dealing with the body rot from standing water sitting in the vehicle, he said. Some of the specialty lighting was very hard to find and we had to find some of it from some collectors.” “A lot of stuff was in disrepair – stuff needed to be replaced and rebuilt,” Claridge recalled. When the shop received the Caddy, he said, it was in pretty sad shape. Ray Claridge, owner of Cinema Vehicles Services, helped with the ECTO-1 refurbishment. ECTO-1 would ultimately be fixed up and used as a promotional tool for the “Ghostbusters” video game release in 2009, but ECTO-1A’s repair ended up being scrapped. For years the vehicles were left to the elements.Ībout 20 years later, the studio decided the ECTO cars would be refurbished, so they were taken to the shop that originally constructed the cars, Cinema Vehicles Services in North Hollywood. In 2010, the promo car was put on the Barrett-Jackson auction block in Arizona, where it sold for $80,000.Īfter being used for promotional purposes (including lending ECTO-1A to Universal Studios, Florida, where tourists regularly swiped items from the car and it was smashed into by a park vehicle), the ECTOS ended up on the Sony back lot. Sony Pictures rented the black pre-ECTO Cadillac for the movie, but ended up buying the car after filming and had “King of Kustomizers” George Barris transform it into an ECTO to use as a promotional vehicle. In the film, scientist and Ghostbuster Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) pulled up to Ghostbusters headquarters in the Caddy and said the car just needed a little work, including “some suspension work and shocks, brakes, brake pads, lining, steering box, transmission, rear end, new rings, mufflers and a little wiring.” into an end-loader ambulance/hearse combination. The vehicle that would become ECTO is a 1959 Cadillac modified by the Miller-Meteor Co. Thirty years later, ECTO-1 remains in great shape and it is on display through March 14 in the Hollywood Gallery of the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. Then the 21-foot long, 7,300-pound car launched out of Ghostbusters HQ, whipped around the corner and raced off down the New York City streets to bust ghosts. In a dramatic entrance, the “ECTO-1” license plate flashed across the screen the firehouse doors opened the car’s headlights flickered on through the fog the blue sirens lit up and the Ghostbusters siren began to wail. The Ectomobile, or ECTO-1, in “Ghostbusters” made a phenomenal on-screen debut, nothing short of a super hero suiting up to fight crime. And the vehicle at the center of the action would be immortalized as one of the greatest star cars of all time. A movie released in the summer of 1984 would earn a spot in cinema history.
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