The Future Was the Futura......[PIC]

 The 1955 Lincoln Futura was designed by by Lincoln-Mercury's chief stylist, Bill Schmidt and was purportedly inspired by the underwater sea life he encountered on a vacation in the Bahamas. Taking on some aspects of the Mako Shark and the Manta Ray, the color he envisioned was from the iridescence of fish scales in the water. His later collaboration with GM stylist Bill Mitchell led to the Corvette XP755 Mako Shark and ultimately to the 1963 Corvette Sting Ray. A chassis with the 368 Lincoln V8 was sent to Ghia of Turin, Italy and using his design, the all steel Futura was crafted for an astonishing $250,000. To achieve that iridescent quality on the finish, The pearlescent frost-blue white was enhanced by Ghia with the ground up scales of thousands of fish! (You're starting to see where that quarter mil went). Overall, this fully driveable car has all the jet aircraft design cues that were so popular in the mid-fifties and many of them were later incorporated in succeeding Lincoln models. Its show days over, Ford loaned it to Metrocolor Productions for the 1959 movie, "It Started With a Kiss", painted red. Fully retired now, George Barris enquired about the Futura and Ford sold it to him for $1.00. Impossible to register or insure, the car sat, moldering away, behind his garage until he took a commission to produce a Batmobile by Greenway Productions for their upcoming 1966 "Batman" series with an seemingly impossible deadline of 3 months. George pulled the Futura into his shop and the rest is history.

I love to put the Futura side-by-side with the Batmobile to see what elements were retained and what was transformed by barris magic. When Minichamps issued the Futura model, I was finally able to retire the old Revell model that I had painted and foiled 9I only addeda pearlecent concoction to the paint and left out the fish scales). I also have a GADM model in 1/43 that's nice but not as satisfying as this 1/18 scale resin model.