TWO BROTHERS are building and driving custom cars straight out of the MOVIES. Marc and Shanon Parker have a street-legal Batman Tumbler, Optimus Prime and Ecto-1 parked inside their shop in Port Canaveral, Florida. The duo started their business four years ago, and already have an incredible fleet of cars straight out of movies like Batman, Transformers and Ghostbusters.
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MotorTranscript
00:0000104.00 When someone says it can't be built, we've got to build it.
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00:04At Parker Brothers Concepts in Florida, the only restriction is imagination.
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00:09The first rule at Parker Brothers is that if we're going to build it, it is going to
00:12be a drivable vehicle.
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00:14Their client list includes celebrities and Hollywood movie studios.
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00:18You only see this kind of stuff in movies, it's awesome.
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00:24Shannon Parker, design and build incredible concept cars, custom motorbikes and stunning
00:31drivable recreations of the most outlandish movie vehicles.
00:36007 007 Somebody comes to us and says I want a car
00:42with some rims and a ground effects and a paint job and we're like that's boring. You
00:46know we want to show people that you can do things that have never been done before and
00:51push the envelope a little bit and create things that are kind of iconic.
00:56Shannon's the designer. I mean he comes up with these ideas. A lot of his inspiration
01:02I think comes more from comic books and movies and he'll come up with these just really outlandish
01:08ideas and then bring me a drawing and go hey let's build this and I'll look at it and go
01:14what were you thinking. He thinks if he can draw it on paper that I can build it out of
01:17metal. Unfortunately it's a little more difficult than that. Everything we build is drivable
01:22so then I have to come up with the way of taking his idea and his inspiration and kind
01:27of turning it into something that's actually functional.
01:29It's really kind of a back and forth. We have to tweak it a little bit because a lot of
01:33times when I draw it, it's too far out there and he has to kind of rein me back in a little
01:38bit but it's that collaboration that makes the vehicles turn out so cool.
01:43As well as concept and custom builds, they also make replicas of famous movie vehicles
01:48including Optimus Prime from Transformers, the Shredder from Battleship and Ecto-1 from
01:54Ghostbusters.
01:56But the most stunning is the Assault Tumbler from The Dark Knight Rises.
02:01We had to build every inch of this from scratch. The frame, the chassis, the body, the interior,
02:07the suspension, the wheels, the glass. I mean pretty much all we could buy was a motor
02:13and it was pretty tricky. Now the whole chassis and body is a tubular chassis and it's all
02:19steel construction. It's not roomy inside but it's pretty comfortable actually. It drives
02:26out really well. We had to add a lot of little cameras. There's a lot of tiny little micro
02:30cams all over it and there's seven or eight video screens on the inside because there
02:37are a lot of blind spots. Yeah, the gas mileage on this thing is not the greatest. It does
02:42have a Corvette engine in it. Because of the shape of it, there's not enough room to put
02:46the motor in the front where it would normally go. So what we had to do was put the motor
02:52in backwards. So the motors here and the transmission is actually inside the vehicle and that runs
02:58into a gearbox that drops down and then the drive shaft comes back underneath the motor
03:04and back to the rear end. The turbine here, which we originally had hooked up with a propane
03:11system to blow flames out but we realized that that was dangerous and stupid and a lot
03:17of people almost got hurt so we disconnected that. Normally we can't get over about thirty
03:21miles an hour with it because all the people around it. It's kind of hard to go fast when
03:25you're being crowded in but if you wanted it to, it could definitely move because it's
03:29got a good engine in it. How can you go wrong? This is just one of the coolest cars that
03:33was ever even dreamed up so occasionally we get to take it out and drive it around and
03:38have some fun with it. When I first saw the Tumbler, I thought it was just the coolest
03:43thing and I think it's awesome that it actually has a New York City Gotham tag on it. It's
03:47really, really cool. If people can look at that and go, oh that's nice but keep passing
03:52by, we probably didn't do our job right. If people have to stop what they're doing
03:57as they're driving down the road, yeah we've done something right.
04:13The brothers aren't sure how much they spend building the Tumbler but how much would they
04:17be prepared to sell it for? I really, I personally wouldn't sell it. To me it's that cool and
04:27it took that much time and effort to build it so I mean why would you get rid of it?
04:32What are you crazy?