It couldn’t have been more than a week to the day I’m writing this that I was discussing movie cars with a friend, and I brought up one of my favorite on-screen film machines: the 1973 Ford Thunderbird driven by the cranked-out high-level hood “T-Bird” in 1994’s “The Crow”. The pairing of David Patrick Kelley’s take on T-Bird’s completely unhinged character against the always-night, always-raining Detroit grime scene and the blood-red, supercharged luxury street brawler that carried T-Bird, Skank, Tin Tin and Funboy around couldn’t have fit better.

The Thunderbird, in its biggest stage, was basically a slightly discounted Lincoln Mark IV at this point. Outside of the Lincoln grille and the hideaway headlights, there was little left to tell the difference between the two titanic personal luxury boats. The 1973 model was a one-year-only body, with the new nose that sported the government-mandated 5-MPH bumper, a new eggcrate grille, opera windows, and either the 429 or 460 cubic inch engines…which could still be ordered to run on leaded fuel.

In the movie, the Thunderbird was a supercharged street machine, with a blower through the hood, chrome steel buckshot mags, yellow neon underglow, a chromed pushbar, shaved door handles with electric poppers, and funky custom side mirrors that would be more at-home on a Porsche 944. Yes, the blower was a fake. The car doesn’t see much screen time until the moment that T-bird’s time runs out on Earth, at which point a prop rig that had a fiberglass shell of the Thunderbird and enough pyrotechnics on it to disguise that fact is blown up. You can see the rolling cart separate from the body shell as the rig explodes and careens into the water. But that left a question: what the hell happened to the actual screen-used car?

Movie cars come in two forms: halo machines and everything else. A halo machine would be Dom Toretto’s Charger from the Fast and Furious franchise, or Bandit’s Trans Am from Smokey and the Bandit. Other cars…say, the Fury from Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, or the Chevelle from Driver, exist because the script calls for something like that. Halo cars are saved and live on. Others…maybe, if they are lucky. Some live on. Many do not. Many go right back to the fleets of movie cars and wait to be re-skinned into whatever the next script calls for. Most often than not, they fall off of the radar, but I always wondered…how do you make a blood red Thunderbird that is half the length of the U.S.S. Missouri disappear into the ether?

Yesterday, I got my answer as to what happened to this beast. Brace yourself, it ain’t pretty.

Yeah. The story ends pretty much here, in a junkyard in North Carolina. It’s in a yard where once it comes in, it doesn’t come back out…but let’s be honest, there is no reason whatsoever for this car to leave. Just look at the section of quarter-panel below the opera window on the driver’s side and tell me with a straight face that you would be willing to restore this car. And yes, it’s the screen car. The remains of the sidepipes are still present, the shaved door handles are there, the poppers are there, the pushbar was in the interior, the hole for the fake blower is present in what is left of the hood. The dark red paint that was shot over the car’s original green paint is mostly faded out, but underneath the trunk lid, where you see the explosives, still shines deep.

I had to call a guy I know who plays in the movie car business to find out how what was a clean street machine wound up looking like it got dragged out of a river after living there for the last twenty years. While we can’t confirm the story to this Ford with 100% accuracy at the time this is written, what probably happened is that after the Thunderbird’s filming time was done, the car probably wound up parked in the back lot of a car wrangler, someone who controls a sizeable fleet of machines for film use and that, unfortunately, was that. Not every movie car is special, nor are they particularly loved. T-Bird’s Thunderbird is going to go away…except for the one-year-only full-width taillight and the pushbar, which were saved. And the inspiration for a big, blown luxo-boat build is still there. As T-bird said in the film before going on his final ride, “There ain’t no comin’ back!”

(Big thanks to Andrew Thompson for the junkyard photos. Appreciate it! -ed.)