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WOMAN: I have never seen anything like this before. Can we touch it?
STEVE: Sure you can.
STEVE: I’ve built a lot of hotrod cars over
the years, and I decided I wanted to something completely ridiculous, and so the idea of
the Banana Car came from that.
STEVE: I was in a gas station and there was
a bowl of fruit as I am standing in line, right next to where I was. On top was a banana
that ran fairly straight and curved at the back, and I picked it up and I am looking
at it, I am studying this, and I am picturing where the wheels would go and the engine and
the seats, and I picture it driving down the road and start laughing.
COMM: A product of the warped minds of art
car fabricators, The Mutant Brothers, the fully road legal Big Banana Car is a regular
sight on the streets of Michigan.
STEVE: I bought a 1993 Ford F150 pickup truck,
took off all the sheet metal, which left the nice slender frame with the engine and the
suspension still attached. I then built the frame, the skeleton of the banana out of rebar,
covered it with chicken wire, sprayed it with urethane foam like you insulate houses with,
then sculpted that to a nice banana shape, and then fiberglassed over the top.
COMM: The fruity vehicle took two and a half
years to build with the work mainly just being done on Sundays.
STEVE: The cost of the Banana Car was spread
out over two and half years so it’s hard to say exactly how much it did end up costing,
somewhere between $20-$25,000. I could have done for a lot less than that but we
replaced everything.
TOM: And to credit Steve though that doesn’t include
any labor. You are looking at hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of man hours.
COMM: The Big Banana Car is four wheel drive
and is surprisingly fast.
STEVE: I’ve had it up to 85mph. Before you
get freaked out that was in Texas, where the speed limit was 80. So I was going 5 over
and I was still the slowest one on the road.
TOM: I’ve got bad news for you. I’ve got
85 in Michigan. But it was downhill.
COMM: The vehicle stands just over 10 feet
tall. However the stem is retractable to let the car go under low bridges.
STEVE: There have been two occasions when
the stem wasn’t low enough. It makes you realise quickly that you just made a mistake.
COMM: Unsurprisingly the Banana Car doesn’t
go unnoticed.
TOM: Oh man, we get the reactions. Quite often
we’ll do events at schools. When there is sixty 7- and 8-year-olds, they are just screaming.
It’s the funniest thing ever.
STEVE: We’ve been asked a few times if we
would sell the Big Banana Car but I realised that if we did what we would be giving up
isn’t just the car, it’s all of that. It’s all that goodwill that just surrounds
it and it’s lovely, it’s wonderful.