The Secret Origin of the Lincoln-Based Batmobile
Famed custom car designer George Barris died earlier this month at the age of 89. Barris (pictured, left) was known in automotive circles as the “King of the Kustomizers” for designing customized vehicles for celebrities such as Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and John Lennon.
Perhaps Barris’s biggest claim to fame were the custom cars he built for some of the biggest TV shows and movies ever produced. Arguably the most famous of those cars was the Batmobile featured in the 1960s Batman TV series. What many may not know is that the vehicle was originally a 1950s-era Lincoln concept car.
The story behind this Batmobile is as captivating as the TV series itself. The vehicle was first designed by two of Ford’s lead stylists, Bill Schmidt and John Najjar Ferzely, who were responsible for unique exterior design elements like the double, clear-plastic canopy top and the large rear tailfins. The vehicle, which was later dubbed the Lincoln Futura, was entirely hand built in Italy by the auto design firm Ghia and cost approximately $250,000 to make.
The Lincoln Futura concept car was officially unveiled at the Chicago Auto Show in January of 1955. It then toured the auto show circuit throughout 1955 and was later prominently displayed in the 1959 movie, It Started with a Kiss. Like many concept cars, however, the Futura never made it into production.
For whatever reason, the Futura was forgotten about soon thereafter. In fact, it may have been consigned to the scrap heap were if not for the intervention of George Barris. Barris struck a deal with Ford that would’ve made even Peter Minuit jealous: he purchased the 1955 Lincoln Futura for the nominal price of $1.00 plus “other valuable consideration” (whether Ford collected on that “consideration” is a mystery lost to time).
The Lincoln Futura sat in Barris’s repair shop for several years until 1966, when producers for the then-upcoming Batman TV series approached Barris to build a new Batmobile. The producers had previously contracted another noted custom car designer, Dean Jeffries, but they were unhappy with the result.
The show’s producers gave Barris three weeks to produce a customized Batmobile. With a short turnaround time, Barris remembered the Futura he purchased years earlier and thought that the rear tailfins were reminiscent of bat wings. And the rest, as they say, was history.
The Barris-designed Batmobile proved to be such a resounding success that Barris built several replicas of it while owning the rights to the original vehicle, which he leased to 20th Century Fox, the studio that produced the Batman series. The Futura-model Batmobile eventually sold at auction in 2013 for the then-record sum of $4.62 million.
While other Batmobile designs have come and gone over the years, the iconic Barris design based on a Lincoln concept continues to endure. As Barris himself once put it, “The car had to be a star in its own right,” and that certainly proved to be accurate.
You can see specs on the Batmobile from the 1966 Batman TV series here.