CLASSIC INTEREST
Holy restoration, Batman!
Sometimes rebuilding a classic car can drive you batty

In 1994, I got a phone call from a gentleman who lived in Toronto and wanted me to restore a car for him that he had just purchased on the West Coast. This was in itself not exceptional; I get calls like this all the time. But what was memorable was the car that he wanted restored. It was a Batmobile.

I am willing to take on any kind of hair-brained project and this one proved no exception. I plunged headfirst into the restoration, not realizing that I had dived into a surrealistic looking-glass wonderland in which Alice would have felt quite comfortable.

The restoration led me all over North America, checking out other Bat cars, talking to Bat fanatics and looking for parts that had some kind of pedigree. These quests led me inevitably to Southern California, home of all things that may have wandered a degree or two from reality.

There I met a gentleman by the name of Bob Butts, who owned a company called Fantasy Car. Bob's company rented weird cars to the film industry and he had parts for the Batmobile, including Bat canopies, Bat phones, Bat labels, Bat handles and Bat switches that he had made years ago for a number of replica Bat cars.

During the series, Barris pulled forms from the original and purportedly made five cars before passing the buck on to Bob Butts, who told me he created at least six more cars from those forms. Though quite innocent in those days, now all of these cars have entered into a world of controversy and mystery.

I imagine there are at least 50 Bat cars running around out there now, most of them fairly pathetic in their attempts to replicate the car from the series in anything other than general shape and colour. But a few models have had huge sums lavished on them to create wonderful reproductions of the original Batmobile.

The car that we restored was a fairly old model and beaten to a pulp. The chassis was cracked and broken, the engine a mess and the inner rear wheel wells coated with thick burned rubber from the tires. I have no idea how many burnouts the car endured, but certainly enough to shatter much of its fibreglass body and make it a daunting project.

Months, and tens of thousands of dollars later, the Batmobile emerged from my shop on October 31, 1995. Hallowe'en, and exactly when it was slated to appear at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto with Batman, Robin, Penguin and Catwoman.

The costumes were spectacular and worn by staff members of mine. Batman's cowl was an original secured from Adam West, the original Batman, by the owner of the Batmobile.

Catwoman, however, was the new version. My wife, Janice, who was to play the role explained in no uncertain terms that if she was going to be Catwoman, she was going to be the Michelle Pfeiffer version, not the Julie Newmar one. During a television appearance she so mesmerized the host he lost track of what he was doing, proving the power of a very tight rubber suit covered in safety pins.

After a very successful appearance at the hospital, the Batmobile fluttered out of my life.

Well, almost. People from all over the planet have contacted me over the years with requests for information about the Caped Crusader's wheels, requests to build other cars and just generally to insult me if I dared to say anything that contradicted their version of the myth, truth be damned. That myth has enveloped all things batty, including the Batmobiles, and more specifically, the car that we built, which Adam West proclaimed to be the best Batmobile in the world.

For the last few years things settled down a bit. I had one brush with a bunch of adolescent Bat nerds by e-mail last summer, but for the most part had forgotten about my involvement.

But guess what? Last week the Batmobile returned, backing into my showroom to be displayed for sale by its current owner. The car wasn't in the building for five minutes when it struck its first victim, a gentleman who had just wandered in to look at a bunch of old cars. He got half way through the showroom, saw the huge black fin rising up, trimmed with brilliant orange, and stopped dead in his tracks, mouth open in astonishment. I'm going to get a lot of that in the near future.

I had forgotten the power of the car and its ability to transfix people who are catapulted to that simpler time in the '60s when we all sat riveted by Batman and Robin, biffing, banging and powing the bad guys.

Maybe if the streets dry up, I'll take it for a drive around town and see how many cars drive into the ditch as I pass by, trailing flames from the afterburner.

On second thought, maybe I'd better not.

David Grainger owns and operates one of the largest automotive restoration companies in North America.