mange1975 posted a link to what is a pretty cool movie trailer in our forums a couple of days ago.
I am a little confused why a movie promoting such a wonderful and nice car can be titled “Wrong”, but look forward to finding out. In any case, Quentin Dupieux is the man behind the movie, and apparently it is about a man and his dog and how they end up changing the lives of people they encounter.
What do these vehicles have in common?
Saab Sonett….
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Light Cycle from the movie, Tron (from 1982)
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3ODe9mqoDE
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The answer lies in the sound.
A website called “Unidentified Sound Object” spoke to the Sound Designer from the original Tron movie, a guy named Frank Serafine. One of the questions they asked was concerned with the sounds used for the Light Cycle.
Max Petrosky: I want to discuss about how you created some of the sound effects. I remember you were telling me earlier that the Lightcycle was created by using a Prophet-5 synthesizer. What it just a Prophet-5 or was it motorcycle sounds mixed in with the Prophet-5?
Frank Serafine: Yeah, it was a combination of Sequential Prophet-5, Minimoog, and then motorcycles that I recorded out in the field with Mike Fremer. We went out to this place called, The Rock Store, it’s like the only place in Southern California where you can come and race in motorcycle racing, because it’s so far out there in the middle of nowhere, and hard to get to that the only way they can catch people is by helicopter. So, they leave everybody alone out there and these guys go out there by the hundreds and race. We got these guys to come and do some incredible stuff for us. You know, all of their “crotch rockets” and racing through the hills and then we were able to mount the microphones onto the motorcycles and have them drive around and Michael Fremer had this interesting Saab Sonett 4-cylinder sports car and we put microphones inside the engine and went, you know, that same day, went riding around with his car and we ended up using a lot of that as well.
So there you go.
All you Sonett owners can now imagine you’re dressed up like this guy the next time you get your Sonett out for a drive 🙂
Unfortunately, it seems the latest generation of Light Cycles from Tron Legacy have not benefited from the soundtrack provided by a Saab V4. It’s the price we pay for technology moving ‘forward’, I guess 🙂
My thanks for Ryan G for the link. A fantastic piece of Saab Trivia.
From Autoblog….
Volkswagen have a new ad for the VW Polo that channels a little bit of Back to the Future and a lot more of Grease for a kind of Gen-X movie mashup commercial.
The ad starts with a gang of teens looking a lot like the T-Birds but cruising around in a town very much like Hill Valley from Back to the Future. They pull up on seeing the Polo and burst into a diner/cafe thing just like Biff and the gang in BTTF.
From there on it’s all Grease as they supposedly have a race, with the hip young Polo dude-of-the-future getting the girl at the end (and showing her the operation of a seatbelt in a very gentlemanly manner).
The positioning of the future car in the 1950’s setting definitely evokes memories of the Back To The Future franchise and keen Saabophiles may recall that there was a Saab in the second Back to the Future movie.
That car was the Saab EV-1. Back to the Future II came out in 1989 but despite the Saab EV-1 being built four years earlier, it still looked futuristic enough for inclusion on the movie set.
And yes, Wikipedia and IMDB are a godsend for stuff like this!
The Rhode Island International Film Festival goes from August 4th to August 9. If ou’re anywhere nearby, you might want to check out “I can speak Swedish”
I Can Speak Swedish is an 18 minute short film by a couple of guys from Melbourne, my old home city. The film came to my attention when I received a cutting from today’s newspaper in an email from Saab Australia.
That’s the car and the film makers, above.
Read the story below (just) and you’ll learn that it was the purchase of this car and the discovey of various items in it that inspired the screenplay, which took a mere 2 days to complete.
The film is one of 100 selcted for the short film category of the festival, and because the festival is Oscar-affiliated, they could end up getting nominated if things go well enough.
If you’re into this sort of arty business and you’re anywhere near Rhode Island, then you might want to catch I Can Speak Swedish. It’s playing at a session starting at 6pm on Sunday evening, at the Columbus Theatre Arts Center.
I’m not sure how the Saab Widget is working out. I hadn’t checked it for a few weeks and I’ve had no emails from anyone alerting me to new things on it, but they keep updating it so someone must be watching.
I just checked in with the Widget tonight and noted they’ve got a video loaded up there looking at XWD from underneath the Saab 9-3x.
It’s a simple and pretty quick piece that identifies the various component parts of the Haldex XWD system. We’ve shown these in photos of the Turbo X in previous articles, but it’s good to get the right name on the right bit.
If you haven’t got the widget loaded up then you can do so at the previous link and catch up with various bits of Saab film from time to time.
This may be old news by now, but the guys and gals at SaabUSA struck me off their Christmas card list some time ago, so I’ve only just discovered it. I guess you can rag on about a crap car configurator too much!
Anyway, whilst checking my RSS feed tonight, I noted a video they posted about how XWD works. Curious, I clicked through to see their new Saabcasts page.
The SaabUSA Saabcasts page has a number of movies on it that you can either watch on site or download for your portable media player.
The XWD film is after the jump for those using a video-friendly browser. Visit Saabcasts for more.
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