They are the butt of jokes and have been for years, but honestly, if you look at what American Motors was facing down in the early 1970s, the cars that they cranked out were actually genius. The Ambassador was a large luxoboat that tried to run with the Buicks, Oldsmobiles, Mercuries and upper-end Plymouths. The Rebel/Matador was the yeoman big car, the workhorse that saw duty with police and a bit of time on television as well. The Javelin was a proper muscle car, as were the SC/Rambler and the Rebel “The Machine”, but those cars had an issue with American Motors’ original game plan: small, dependable and economical cars. And at the beginning of the 1970s, it would be small, dependable economy cars that would make or break a company. The Gremlin, surprisingly enough, was a solid answer to the demands of consumers: by hacking the tail off of an AMC Hornet, the end result was a minor redesign of a car that was already in production, which didn’t need massive re-engineering (and the budget to go with it) to push to market. Beating the Ford Pinto and Chevrolet Vega to market, AMC’s subcompact ran, mostly unchanged, through 1982 (although it ditched the Gremlin name and got a bit of a refresh in 1979 when it became the AMC Spirit) and proved to be a dead-nuts reliable unit…just one with a bit of quirky styling.

It might be as Seventies as disco and just as unloved to most, but any car has it’s fans and apparently one of them is master ventriloquist Jeff Dunham. We know Dunham is a car collector and enthusiast. We’ve seen his Dodge Challenger at SEMA, and we’ve heard tales of his Hummer…and his “bluuue” Prius…in his stand-up acts, but we didn’t suspect he owned these two! The green 1972 is a 258ci six-powered standard model, and the 1973 is a 304-powered Gremlin X Levi’s Edition, both of which he brought to Jay Leno’s Garage for the Leno look over. You know what’s in Leno’s garages, so how do you think the two Kenosha compacts will fare when driven?