Besides John Belushi, one of the biggest stars of the 1978 comedy Animal House was the Deathmobile.
That was the scary car that tears through a local parade so rowdy fraternity house members can get their revenge on a community that wasn't all that keen on their outrageous antics. Like just about everything else in the movie, the Deathmobile's performance was hilarious.
Now, as Animal House returns to big screens this weekend (Aug 14 and 17), we're finding out more about the Deathmobile and how the scene came together.
Actor Tim Matheson wants you to know that he rode that Deathmobile just like his smooth-talking character, Otter,is portrayed as having done onscreen.
Matheson says he volunteered — nay, insisted — on being onboard even though there was no cinematic reason to be there. He was off-camera in the scene. Maybe you could call it idiotic research.
The actor, now 68, says he just wanted to be next to legendary stuntman Bud Ekins, who drove the Deathmobile for the stunt.
"So I can say now that I was with Bud Ekins inside the Deathmobile," says Matheson. " I just took a ride."
Matheson grew up doing horse stunts and watching the stunt guys on TV series such as Bonanza and The Virginian. So he gravitated towards Ekins, the celebrated stuntman who doubled for Steve McQueen in The Great Escape.
"I introduced myself to Bud Ekins and got to know him," says Matheson. "And he said, 'Yah, you can come in' "
Matheson crawled in the ominous mobile, strapped in and noticed it was sure hard to see out of the car which the Delta house had made for ramming speed to take out foes like dreaded Dean Wormer.
"So just before we started I said, 'My God, How do you see out of this?' And (Ekins) said, 'I cannot see a (darn) thing.' He was funny.' " says Matheson. "I was just hanging on for dear life. It was just fun to be there and an honor."
Matheson also drove the classic 1962 Lincoln Continental which was later transformed to the Deathmobile onscreen.
During the scene where Otter pulled into the Delta Lake Club parking lot during the fraternity road trip, it was Matheson who slammed into the other cars for a parking spot.
He convinced director John Landis to do the stunt which allowed him to stay in camera as the car crashed — and as the others just jumped out of the car to head to the club.
"It wasn’t a dangerous stunt, but they would never let us do it today," says Matheson. "All I had to do was get going about 12 miles per hour, step on the gas and then slam it ."
Onscreen, Flounder (Stephen Furst) is gutted because his brother's classic Lincoln is destroyed during the Delta Lake Club excursion. They have no option but to turn it into the Deathmobile.
In reality, that classic Lincoln was much harder to destroy.
"The steel in those Lincolns was so thick that we had to use a skip loader to bang up the car enough to have it register onscreen," says Landis.
