Archive for November, 2020

Ultraman is BACK.

Sun ,29/11/2020

So I never got around to watching the original 60s cheesy live-action Ultraman – always more a Gojira guy, but maybe someday. In the meantime, Netflix has been doing a bunch of new, original anime, and they put out a season of Ultraman last year – i have to say, despite the usual anime sometimes-main-character-silliness, it’s actually pretty good, especially the buildup to the last few episodes of season 1 – here’s to season 2 – maybe they can do these faster than live-action given CV19 production and content development limitations?

here’s the trailer for season 1 – great stuff!

candybowl

Vector me….NOW.

Sun ,01/11/2020

So wayyyyyy back in the C/D monthly subscription days, the Vector was always one of my two “halo cars” when it came out (the other being the b+b Cw311 which became the Isdera Imperator when it actually went to short-lived production). The Vector never really got that far though, acc. to this video, only 20 ended up getting made. And like so many of these era cars, while I’d love to try and drive one (with of course the $1M insurance policy in place before I started it up and broke a window switch or something stupid), a lot of it hasn’t aged well.

in the example seen in this video, it has more air dams and that stupid back spoiler that the original W2 car didn’t have at debut time (link below to that C/D article) and to me, (like when comparing the Lotus Esprit Turbo vs. the S1, S2 or S3 that don’t have them) all that extra crap detracts from the appearance – I doubt it makes much difference functionally in the end, though.

And given my far-overly-analog approach to cars these days, that instrument panel would drive me nuts after one drive (if not before the first drive was over – nope, I’m NEVER owning a Tesla or anything like that, NOPE) but it wasn’t the interior I was crazy about with this car anyway, it was the looks and the whole ‘concept’ of the car as the original 1980 C/D article had (that was the Vector W2, slightly earlier than the version seen in this video) and in the actual C/D road test a bit later.

in the end, I suspect the Cw311 would be a far easier car to live with (the Cw311 was virtually a production car even at the prototype stage, whereas the Vector could be argued was *always* a prototype in many ways…) but still, I agree with Doug DeMuro – this is still arguably the craziest car ever built – Somewhere, 75+ year old Jerry Wiegert is smiling…