Lighter side of flying cars, in fiction and on silver screen: Images Clockwise from top left:Chitty Chitty Bang Bang;Sean Connery as James Bond flies ‘Little Nellie’ in ‘You only Live Twice’; The rare first edition cover of the 1998 Harry Potter book...and its 2002 film version; The flying police car, ‘Spinner’ in ‘Blade Runner 2049’; Roger Moore in his folded flying car, says ‘Fill her up please’ in the Bond film ‘Octopussy’.
When fiction foretold fact
Two strands of fiction have traditionally intrigued readers with visions of cars that can fly: One is hard core science fiction (SF); the other is children’s fiction. And in both cases, movie adaptations have added to the stunning realism of such visions. The Wikipedia entry for “Flying Cars in Fiction” lists 53 different books and films.
One of the seminal works of SF that first conceived flying taxis was the 1968 work “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”, by Phillip K. Dick, that became a cult film by Ridley Scott, the Harrison Ford starring “Blade Runner” (1982), followed by a sequel, “Blade Runner 2049” (2017). Both films feature flying police cars or “Spinners”.
Paul Verhoeven's 1990 action thriller “Total Recall”, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and its 2012 reboot, both feature floating cars – though they were illustrative of magnetic levitation rather than pure flying.
When Harry Potter and his friends move on their magical missions, they prefer to fly. In the second Potter novel, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” (1998), a flying car -- a blue 1962 Ford Anglia -- comes in handy for the first time. The 2002 film version had some dizzy sequences featuring the car.
In the 1989 “Back to the Future- II”, the crazy scientist Dr Emmet “Doc” Brown says "Where we're going, we don't need roads!”. His classic Delorean car not only flies, it’s a time machine too.
While author Ian Fleming lavished a lot of detail on the classy cars that James Bond drove, the Bond films took these transports – literally – to heights. In the opening sequence of the 1983 film “Octopussy”, Roger Moore tries out a tiny jet plane that folds its wings, so that when short of petrol, he lands and drives to the nearest gas station, with the famous line “Fill her up please!” His predecessor as Bond, Sean Connery, had his own flying gadget, a single seater called ‘Little Nellie” in “You Only Live Twice”. Even Bond villains own flying cars: In the 1974 film, “The Man With The Golden Gun”, bad guy Scaramanga and his dwarf sidekick Nick Nack, drive an AMC Matador Coupe that sports wings and flies when the need arises.
Interestingly, Bond author Ian Fleming also wrote one children’s story – and its centrepiece was a flying car that children have loved for decades. Its unusual noise, gave its name to the 1964 book and the 1968 film: “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”.
How close did these fantasy flying cars get to the real things that are coming soon? You be the judge!
On a more serious note... we have covered Flying Car ( eVTOL) developments at home and abroad earlier this week: