I think by now we’ve all glumly accepted that a good portion of our entertainment diet is made up of reconstituted ideas. I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes these old idea reboots work well, like that rebooted Battlestar Galactica did in the mid-2000s. Often, they’re just absolute garbage, like the Knight Rider (not to be confused with defunct media company Knight Ridder) attempted reboot in 2008. NBC seems especially fond of these, and recently showed a trailer for their latest attempted reboot, this time based on the old Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell-starring time travel show, Quantum Leap. The trailer seems fine for what it is, at least if you’re willing to ignore what may be the most ridiculously terrible attempt to show what a manual transmission looks like in all of modern television. It’s bad.
[ED Note: Battlestar Galactica was great for two seasons and then utterly jumped the shark, so I’m not sure I give it a full pass. – MH]
I was alerted to this nightmare via a tweet from Friend of The Autopian Charles Brand, but I don’t want to show you the tweet here, because it’ll be more fun if you watch the trailer first and can spot it for yourself. I’m pretty sure that if you’re on this site, you won’t be able to miss it:
Holy shit, right? What the hell is that?
Okay, in case you missed it, somehow, here’s a couple of screengrabs of the shifter as seen in the trailer, stitched together so the whole thing is visible:
The fuck am I even looking at here? What has a shift pattern like that? The only car that comes to mind that used this sort of double-handled-trident shift pattern with a gate would be an oh, lemme think, oh yeah, a 1977 Imagino Unreal GT, an incredible, fast V7-powered grand tourer from fucking Narnia that doesn’t fucking exist, because nothing uses a shift pattern like this, especially a 1983 Ford Econoline as seen in that clip.
Sure, there’s cars with unusual shift patterns out there, like early Porsche 911 five-speeds with that dogleg first gear, or the crazy Citroën 2CV umbrella-handle shifter, but nothing like whatever the hell this is, which would require you to move the shifter down and to the left and then down again to go from first to second, an act as unfamiliar to human arms as feeding yourself with a hand that goes up and over your head and in front of your eyes.
Also, a square-section shift lever? Have you ever driven a car with one of those? Ever? Okay, maybe if you have a Peterbilt with an aftermarket shift lever, or some other aftermarket thing. But I’m still going to wager it’s nothing like what’s in that picture.
Just to put this all in context, the main character is someone that time-travels into the bodies of various people across time in order to right some sort of wrongs or get people to bone or stop historic missteps or whatever. In this trailer, it appears that the main guy has been sent to 1985. I know this because there’s a shot of a theater marquee that shows this:
…and a quick Google search told me that both those films were released in June of 1985. Also, some other sign says so.
The van he’s time-teleported or whatever into is a 1983 or 1984 Ford Econoline, which I’m pretty sure of because 1983 was the first year Ford used the blue oval badge in the center of the grille instead of chrome F O R D letters on the hood. For reference, here’s the Econoline in the trailer:
…and here’s a 1983 Econoline in Club Wagon trim, with a similar paint scheme to the van in the trailer:
Now, a manual Econoline is a rare beast; the vast majority came with automatics, and a stick shift one is rare enough that I actually wrote about how shocked I was to see one for sale back in 2017. You’re statistically more likely to meet a glassblower who owns corgis and thinks you’re sexy than you are to encounter a manual Ford Econoline.
I guess part of the plot here is that the main scientist, who seems to be from our year of the lord 2022, goes back in time to the 1980s and, ha ha, he can’t drive stick, and yet he must, as he seems to have jumped into the body of a getaway driver behind the wheel of a vanishingly rare manual Econoline. So that’s why they had to make this Econoline into a manual. I get that. What I don’t get is why they prop team did it so badly.
It’s not just that it doesn’t look like an Econoline stick shift setup, as seen above there, because that barely matters: Those are so rare almost nobody really knows what an Econoline manual shifter looks like. The problem is that it doesn’t look like any manual transmission setup at all, period.
Whoever made this seems to have never actually seen a manual transmission, but perhaps had it described to them over the phone, poorly. And then they made more work for themselves. The shifter didn’t have to be gated, because not only is that more work, it’s the root cause of the problem here (that wildly implausible shift pattern), and no workhorse van has a gated shifter.
Why did they bother to make this thing at all? Why did they cut that plastic (maybe metal?) shift gate and make a sticker with the gear numbers on it and put a foam sheet inside it and screw on a bezel with hex-head screws and shove that square-section tube in there like it was a gearshift, when they could have taken a trip to a junkyard, gotten literally any manual transmission shifter from any car, and had that work a billion times better by just plopping it on the floor?
Or maybe they could have just picked some period-correct van that did have a manual shifter? How hard would it have been to get, say, a 1982 Volkswagen Vanagon, for example? Not hard at all. Plenty of those were manuals.
Let’s look at it again:
It makes no sense. It looks like absolute crap, it’s inaccurate to the point of distracting the viewer from the narrative and it was much, much more work than just yanking a real shifter from something.
I reached out to a friend who has done movie prop work, and she was baffled, too. The best answer she could give was that it may have been a last-minute, rush request, and the sloppy, inaccurate work was just the result of it being a rush job. Of course this happens sometimes, but for such a pivotal prop, one that gets some direct focus by the camera and attention, and is a crucial part of the plot, this seems like a huge oversight.
I mean, this same trailer has effects like this:
I’m certain the props team is more talented and capable than this fake shifter shows, but damn.
Nobody caught this in editing or review? How is that possible? Or, more likely, whoever was reviewing this footage either didn’t know what a manual shifter looked like themselves or just didn’t think it was a big deal, figuring it’s close enough, and who gives a shit? Everyone knows what it’s supposed to be, right?
Well, maybe, but there are those of us out there – not an insignificant number – who do know what a stick shift looks like. Saying something this obviously inaccurate is just fine would be like if the script called for a banana, and the props department delivered something that looked like this:
I mean, that’s basically like a banana, it’s generally the right color and texture and has some parts of the shape right, if not everything, but the viewer will know what you mean, right? Is that not close enough?
I think we all know it’s not close enough. Because while it may have some similarities, it’s not a fucking banana. Just like that shifter isn’t a fucking manual transmission shifter.
Details matter. Especially when there’s no reason for the details to be wrong in the first place. The way shifters look isn’t a secret, and real ones aren’t hard to find, after all.
Maybe there’s some complex plot point I’m missing here, like he was sent not just back in time, but they changed the premise of the show so he get sent into alternate universes, and this one is just like ours, except manual transmissions have awkward, stupid patterns and levers with corners.
If that’s the case, my apologies to everyone who worked on this production. You’ve done a bang-up job.
That shifter is ridiculous!
But Torch’s idea to use a VW Vanagon as a getaway vehicle is at least as bad. I mean who would believe anyone could outrun the cops in a 67 hp van? Consider my suspension of disbelief utterly broken.
OJ did a pretty good job in an SUV that made more whoosh than go.
Yeah, I mean I guess maybe the Vanagon could be some sort of disguise in itself. Perhaps the cops would chase a tan Ford Econoline instead thinking nobody would attempt a getaway in a Vanagon. Or if an astute detective did pull over the Vanagon, he can show them the 5-hour chili he has simmering on the stove in the back as an airtight alibi.
As for OJ “getting away”, I don’t think that had anything to do with that Bronco (which still had more than 3 times the hp of a Vanagon), that was all Shapiro, Cochran, Dershowitz, etc.
Totally agree. My post was pure sarcasm.
“The only car that comes to mind that used this sort of double-handled-trident shift pattern with a gate would be an oh, lemme think, oh yeah, a 1977 Imagino Unreal GT, an incredible, fast V7-powered grand tourer from fucking Narnia that doesn’t fucking exist, because nothing uses a shift pattern like this, especially a 1983 Ford Econoline as seen in that clip.”
I see that my writing style has rubbed off on Jason. I make absolutely no apologies.
Because quite frankly, this might be the finest paragraph in auto journalism ever. And yes, I have absolutely read everything written by Brock Yates. And this very well may top it all.
I am sort of that way with Autos. But with Computer stuff or musical instruments I irrationally lose my mind. I think I need to get over it, but that probably will not happen. Prop departments could pay a pro designer their minimum X hours and have them just check all the things that fall under their expertise.
I don’t mind it on budget indie films but they seem to get wrong less than bigger budget project.
… no, you know what, this absolutely is. Period.
Because it reminded me of what I was taught by an actual competent teacher back in 7th grade. The purpose of writing is not simply to convey information, but to convey emotion. If your reader isn’t feeling anything, then you’d best be writing an owner’s manual.
And reading this paragraph? I could hear and feel Jason’s pace picking up, his intonation changing, the punctuated shout of ‘especially a 1983 Ford Econoline’, every word drenched in sarcasm and fully justified ire. Like somebody had just come to his house and insulted his mother. Or said that tail lights are boring.
So there you have it, judges. Your 2022 Best News Article winner.
Clearly what happened is the interns rushing the design notes to the props department skidded onto each other in a classically comic hallway collision and the “Quantum Leap” reboot *chocolate* got into the “Sliders” reboot * peanut butter*. The studio said fuck it, it would take too much time to fix. The interns were immediately fired, the producers stand poised to take any and all the credit for *their* creative brilliance (or to cast all blame on the interns if the show bombs). The studio currently has their legal team trying to figure out if this mashup needs any royalties paid to the creators of the original shows.
For those who were lucky enough to have missed the original Sliders was a show in which the main characters slid from one alternate reality to the next across an unstable Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky Bridge. In these alternate realities most things are the same as ours except perhaps the traffic lights colors are different green = stop, red=go), or the Golden Gate bridge is azure blue. This explains the whacky gated shifter in a Ford van.
So now we have a mashup of Quantum Leap and Sliders where our hero goes back and forth in time across alternate realities. Will it be any good? I dunno, but the futures of two poor former unfortunate interns hangs in the balance so I hope so.
“but they changed the premise of the show so he get sent into alternate universes, and this one is just like ours, except manual transmissions have awkward, stupid patterns”
Maybe each episode will feature a different bizarre transmission. In the next one, you literally “row the gears” with a big oar handle thing. In the one after that, you just have a line (forward and backward) and the transmission is semi automatic and chooses what forward and backward are based on the speed. In another, you have two tiny fiddly levers like on an old bicycle. The terrible ergonomics are endless!
Oh ooh, maybe in one of them, brake lights are amber, and turn signals are red. Reverse lights would just be all of them coming on at once!
I don’t literally LOL very often, but I literally LOLed when I got to the oar handle part. Thanks.
As a gearhead I’m constantly annoyed by automotive inaccuracies in movies and shows, but it’s such a common occurrence that I’ve learned to ignore it for the most part.
But this? You’re right in calling out this nonsense. They actually had to put in extra effort to make something so obviously fake when they could have just pointed a camera at the shifter on pretty much any vehicle ever and had the same effect.
Your props are bad and you should feel bad!
The only one of those that really gets to me is when those big trucks blow an air brake line and the thing continues on out of control instead of slowing to a stop right away.
Director: “The manual transmission isn’t shiftery enough”.
Prop department: “Here’s the most shiftery shifter we could fabricate in 10 minutes”
Based on my (admittedly limited) experience on TV and movie sets, I am 100% sure this is the correct answer.
During the breakdown of the script, nobody thought that the insert shots were going to be of anything other than the actual shifter. But when the second unit started blocking the shot, it became clear that the real shifter would look extremely boring in close up. Also, I bet the director wanted something that looked truly intimidating. Something that not even our scientist hero could figure out.
Hence, quick trip to junkyard, where some sort of selector lever from a random agricultural machine was found, and a legend was born.
Eh, I’m just as thrown by the idea of The Goonies and St. Elmo’s Fire as a double feature outside of a drive-in, as wouldn’t most Goonies viewers have been way too young for St Elmo’s Fire, and most St Elmo’s Fire viewers too young to have Goonies-age kids? That seems equally like they put more thought into the blatant signifier (obvious manual transmission shifter) than if it made any sense (weird shift pattern).
Maybe at the drive-in. First movies were usually aimed at the youngsters and the second for the adults.
Yeah, I noted the drive in (I’ve for sure seen a handful of movies I had no business seeing just because I hadn’t fallen asleep yet), but on a marquis for a traditional movie theatre is a little weird.
me am spambot me soil me own trousers
On a film-car tangent, if you can’t afford to make it correct, maybe restrict the interior shots? Watched Mr. Holmes last night, and the very first moments annoyed: In 1947, why would a probably current taxi cab have 70+ years of filth and discoloration on the interior headliner and upholstery? Restore, or just do long shots through the glass please.
1st season of Downton Abbey, 2011, same thing: a limo owned by an aristocrat in 1912 shouldn’t look like the upholstery is 100 years old. BBC probably didn’t want to pay to buy and restore period cars until they knew they had a hit, but Maggie Smith didn’t look any better sitting on faded velvet.
Jason…I think it’s deliberate. I mean, if YOU quantum leaped into that getaway driver, and you looked down and saw that shift pattern, you’d be confused as hell, too. As this article proves all too well.
Occupational dyslexia.
I can’t wait to see how they recreate rotary dial phones or the Sony Walkman. Actually I can wait, I think I’ll just skip this show and catch the next reboot in about 5 years.
THIS is why I read Autopian. It reassures me that there are people out there who share my very real frustrations. That, and an unhealthy fascination with taillights…
I don’t even drive stick and my eyes are bleeding.
Still laughing at a 1977 Imagino Unreal GT. I always wanted one of those with the V7, but the best I could get was a W3.
Yeah, those W3s are COMMON. It’s the horizontally opposed fives that you want to hold out for.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SZBa6lKEg38
I’m not a huge fan of Lane Keeping Assist, but if ever there was justification…
The gated shifter does make sense though, it makes it much more obvious it’s a manual. If they just had a rubber boot plenty of people would just assume that’s what the PRNDL looks like in an old van.
Why they couldn’t spend .2 seconds to google what a gated shifter looks like I have no idea.
Also, the van is a 3 pedal car. That shifter is for the audience.
I think that third pedal is fake, too. That’s almost definitely an automatic Econoline.
Maybe they didn’t have access to the interwebs?
The Philadelphia Police logo however is spot on.
I loved Quantum Leap. It was a major source of my history education as an early teen.
Ive never gone back to it as an adult for fear of absolute disappointment. Not sure whether I should watch or avoid this.
Speaking as a fellow similarly-aged fan, it’s pretty safe to rewatch. Aside from the typical 80s/early 90s cheese, it has aged pretty well. Probably because the majority of it takes place in the 60s and 70s. A lot of the stories are still kind of relevant today, but it’s also an interesting look back at how we, as people of the 90s, looked at the civil rights era and beyond.
Also, I just want to see this new guy leap into the body of Scott Bakula and prevent him from making the series finale of Enterprise.
It totally holds up. Same age group as you guys, I rewatched during the pandemic and enjoyed it, and even caught stuff I’d missed when it was on prime time (inc. the coolness and added dimension of the “evil leaper” plot line).
Bakula’s Sam Beckett remains a beacon of good-natured kindness and problem-solving, which is totally refreshing in current outrage-filled culture.
“Also, I just want to see this new guy leap into the body of Scott Bakula and prevent him from making the series finale of Enterprise.”
This made my pee my pants.. I’m in the grp who actually liked Enterprise (at least the last 3 seasons), its a shame it didn’t keep going. The finale was totally stupid! We have Les Moonves to blame for its cancelation (that and poor ratings).
I liked it too, and I’m standing by the fact that T’Pol is most realistic XO in the Star Trek Universe and it’s not especially close.
Also, don’t be bitter about the latter BG seasons. By the time you accept that a Bob Dylan song is magically heard some, it turns out, 60-90,000 years before our own time you get to sort of just roll with it.
Yeah T’Pol was great, great actress too! The whole cast was pretty great, Trip was good. He later appeared on Stargate Atlantis as a villain.. he was great!!
So much this. I can tolerate a lot (I even sat through A Night in Sickbay) but the finale was just a bridge too far.
Some years back I rewatched it on ‘flix and enjoyed the show even if I didn’t enjoy the experience. It seems ‘flix didn’t include all of the episodes, but went ahead and renumbered them all like nothing was missing, except it’s Quantum Leap and it always shows a preview of next week and the very end of each episode, so when the next one starts and doesn’t match you know you missed something. That part was annoying, the show itself is still awesome though.
This is fine. The prop department couldn’t very well have written “This is a manual transmission” on the shift lever, and there weren’t any gear markings on the shifter boot in the actual Econoline. Had they gone with an earlier model, the manual transmission would have been a three on the tree, and that would have confused all the yoots. Marking four shift positions and reverse on a plate was just fine.
I am however concerned by the actors repeated rubbing of their faces. Is it now impossible, in the year of our lord 2022, to grow facial hair? In what year, after 1985 did human males lose the ability to grow facial hair? I find this disturbing as I’m considering growing a mustache.
They could have also found any shifter with a pattern on the shift knob. Or made a fake shifter with a pattern that made sense they could have found in 20 seconds of Googling.
I mean, even putting first and third in the lower row would ALMOST make sense, but…
Exactly! And then make the gates a straight slant (W-shaped) instead of this right-angled pattern (“two-handled trident”). Then the pattern would be unusual (and “wrong” for the car at hand) but at least it would be usable.
At least they didn’t show the column mounted shifter in other shots. It’s like when watching a scene in a moving car and the shift lever is in the park position.
I just tried to mimic the action of shifting from 1st to 2nd to 3rd and I pulled something in my shoulder.
Thanks for the warning, the check is in the mail.
One puzzlement I’ve always had and have never gotten an answer for is this: In movies and on TV, whenever they show a view through the windshield of someone driving, the shift lever is always in “Park”. I’m sure the continuity folks cannot overlook this detail 100% of the time.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who is bothered by that. I used to point it out all the time, now I just make an exasperated noise and my wife goes, “Yes, I know, it’s in Park.”
My wife spots this too lol
It makes sense if the movie is “Parks and Recreation”.
I’ll see myself out.
It’s bad enough when you see a column shifter in park poking over the dash when the camera is facing the driver, but the other day I was watching something where the camera was behind the driver showing them “driving” and sawing at the wheel and you could clearly see the column shifter in park. Come on, that’s just sloppy.
There’s a reference to this in “The Purple Rose of Cairo.” Jeff Daniels’s character, who walked off of a movie screen, jumps into a car and just starts wiggling the wheel back and forth, expecting the car to just start driving, because that’s how it works in the movies.
I think that the reason is a technical/budget issue – many if not most of the driving scenes in TV and movies have the car on a special trailer and all of the real driving is being done in a low-profile rig in front which allows interior camera shots and some exteriors without seeing the real driver. The car is just parked on the trailer – hence it would have to be in ‘park’ or the shifter would have to be somehow disabled or faked. The problem with that approach is that you usually also need to cover shots of the vehicle from the outside, from distances where the trailer filming rig would be visible. That means the car needs to be drivable or you need to have two identical vehicles – one with the shifter mod and one normal version. Kind of a pain from a props perspective when you can just have one, normal, road-legal vehicle and just drive it on and off the trailer depending on the shots you need.
Would it be so difficult to put it in neutral and set the parking brake?
How about just bending the shift lever out of the way so it can’t be seen?
Cars in Hollywood don’t have parking brakes?
Ziggy says there’s a 96.4% chance a Quantum Leap reboot is going to be garbage anyway.
I’m going to be contrarian and say it has potential. Because it’s a continuation, not a reboot.
Pure reboots are mostly meh b/c nearly every show they reboot was good enough the first time for the reboot to be unnecessary (yeah, that’s right Magnum, p.i.)
But a continuation holds out the potential of just enough nostalgia to hook us but with the possibility of new directions that aren’t just rewarming old episodes/concepts.
Is Scott Bakula involved at all? If not, I guess we can hold out hope for a cameo at some point.
Don’t quote me on this, but I am almost positive that’s a real shifter, albeit one from a tractor. I vaguely remember using a friend’s old Deutz-Allis that had a shift setup like this. Drove me nuts. It was gated and everything IIRC. There is a newer JohnDeere with a similar shift pattern (5075M, maybe?) that uses the same pattern, though the shifter looks nothing like that. Either way, makes no sense in an Econoline.
Tractors do have weird shift patterns sometimes, but they’re not making shifters out of thin plastic and sticker paper and foam sheets and square tubes.
Goddammit, that send me googling for weird tractor shift patterns rabbit hole, and this came up
JFC that made me laugh out loud. What in the actual cocking fuck is that even? Holy hell.
Oh buddy, you have know idea. The oliver double neutral was amazing. Imagine 2 H patterns connected to each other.
http://s7d2.scene7.com/is/image/SteinerTractor/OLS1302?$prod$
John Deere New Generation tractors also had a very interesting shifter.
I’m not a tractor expert, but drove a smallish one periodically for a mowing company during a couple of college summers. It was a John Deere 750 if I recall correctly.
On those, there were something like 6 to 8 gears, but you were never progressing up/down through the gears as in a car. So the pattern didn’t need to make sense for that.
There was no need to start off in first gear. You could take off from a standstill in any gear without stalling it.
The gears were for maintaining an appropriate ground speed for your task when the diesel engine was at full operating speed to run the accessories (mowing deck in this case).
Today they’re not. Back in the 70 to 80s… you bet your bacon.
I want to say it was from a Gleaner combine, but I couldn’t find any examples. Either way, that method of construction (including the square rod) was totally the norm. Never underestimate what low-volume production will yield.
As for my contribution to weird shift patterns, here’s one from a Deutz tractor:
Wow, that’s a nasty shift pattern. I’d have been across the hedgerow and into the neighbor’s field before hitting the 5-4 downshift. Unless the transmission was destroyed in the process.
The example I grew up with was constantly going through clutches
That 5 to 6 shift at speed with pair of fully loaded gravity boxes behind you was a bitch and a half.
Oh, THANKS for making my eyes bleed with whatever that thing was!
I was thinking the same thing there is plenty of heavy equipment that is not meant to shift on the fly that looks alot like this.
That banana is Pikachu. And that shifter is nonsense.
Perhaps there’s some additional dialog where our hero announces he can’t drive a stick, and then having never driven a stick before he proceeds to outrun the police, which is even more ridiculous.
“You’re statistically more likely to meet a glassblower who owns corgis and thinks you’re sexy”
If this was Corgi (singular) instead of Corgis (plural), you described my wife. So close.
That attention to detail bodes ill for the success of the series.