replica, given the originals were either wrecked or just driven to death this was a replica built to be as faithful as can be, with some modern overhauls such as a better performing custom built transmission, a fully rebuilt 400ci V8 and of course a damn must these days air conditioning. In real life, back in 2018, Burt Reynolds’ estate sold his private Firebird S.E. Can always count on me derailing my own content into some lesson you didn’t know yet and I’ll bet didn’t feel like learning, but you’re welcome, now you too can tell people about the weird restrictions on car headlights in the US from the fifties through the eighties! Anyway, back to the hero car here. You can damn near count American cars that retained round headlights into the 1980s on one hand.Īnd there’s the oddball history lesson of this particular article, last time it was dealer specific tuners that made some of the most powerful muscle cars and this time its… headlights. Now, it’s more or less a free-for-all, while size restrictions are there, they are loose and quite varied but most importantly the strange restriction that it had to be circular was lifted, and every Goddamn automotive designer over night made a square-headlight version of their favorite car. had the local headlight swap treatment, but now lets time jump to 1975. This is why all European or Asian cars imported to the U.S. So now you have two unique headlight designs, but still they’re all the same size across the board. Then in 1958, the first drastic change was permitted twin goddamn headlights, yes baby! And you can tell designers were quite literally waiting for this as damn near every single car from then on would have twin headlights and be permitted to be smaller than the odd 7 inch requirement, but this came again with another weird limit: yes, you can now have smaller headlamps, but they could only be 5 ¾ inch. From 1940 through 1957, you could only have one headlight per side, and had to have low and high beam filaments in the same lamp and could only be 7 inches in diameter. Not only were they at first restricted quite literally to size, diameter and… shape, it also took well over thirty years for designers to be allowed to use square shaped headlights.
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You see, headlights of all things had a odd, hard line restriction to it. While the movie’s popularity made it literally destroy the Camaro’s reputation as a whole, causing the Firebird sales to surge massively and the Camaro sales to tank, part of the iconic look of the new 1977 Firebird at the time was the adjustment of a quite strange U.S. Hell, the star car in fact is 1970s through and through. The only thing that could arguably be more 1970s is a field made out of brown, red and yellow striped shag carpet with the Bee Gees doing a concert on top of it. It played heavily on the odd as all hell distribution snafu Coors Brewing Company found itself in( which the short of it is as follows: Coors wasn’t permitted to sell past the Mississippi until it got the rights and permissions to do so in 1986, prior to that it only sold in 11 states in the direction of the West Coast, making it hugely desirable on the East Coast), it had CB radio which kicked off in popularity in the 1970s and to cap it all off, it had the most bankable actor of the late 1970s in there leading the show: Burt Reynolds, who unfortunately passed away in 2018 and the soundtrack was partially made by Jerry Reed, country music-slash-actor extraordinaire. and the bad guy( as far as a cop can be one) drove a ’77 LeMans. It quite literally served as an ad for Pontiac( Hal Needham fell in love with the car and Pontiac fortunately obliged his new-found love interests), with the hero’s car being a fresh off the line fully kitted out ’77 Firebird T/A S.E. Smokey and the Bandit is in all rights not just a solid movie, but also a time capsule of 1970s America.
Pontiac firebird trans am 1977 movie#
And everyone knows this car, let’s be totally fair – it’s one of the most recognizable movie cars, ahead of the ’76 Gran Torino from Starsky & Hutch, it might even be ahead the ’69 Charger from the Dukes of Hazzard.
![pontiac firebird trans am 1977 pontiac firebird trans am 1977](https://photos.classiccars.com/cc-temp/listing/130/3724/18856723-1977-pontiac-firebird-trans-am-std.jpg)
![pontiac firebird trans am 1977 pontiac firebird trans am 1977](http://davidsclassiccars.com/images/full/1977-pontiac-firebird-trans-am-ta-66-liter-400-v-8-light-blue-metallic-1.jpg)
The somewhat harder to come by and in my opinion the better of the ’77 Firebird versions offered by the various model kit companies, lovingly crafted by Revell from a die-cast mold.