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The Fifth Element (1997)
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Until the Total Recall remake this year, The Fifth Element must have held the record for the most flying cars ever in a movie (we’re still not sure it doesn’t – anyone want to count? And anyway, are the ones in Total really flying cars? We’ll get to that in a minute). Bruce Willis drives the flying version of a yellow New York taxi, chased by flying police cars weaving through flying vehicles of every make and shape imaginable (but all of which look like they’d make really cool floating bath toys).
Total Recall (2012)
The car chase sequence in Total Recall was part Blade Runner, part The Fifth Element and part Minority Report . But are the cars really flying? Or are they some kind of magnetic hovercraft? They only ever over a few feet above – or underneath – the roads and ramps. And when Quaid turns off the “mag compression” the car tumbles like the one at the end of the Blues Brothers (though somehow less spectacularly despite decades of improvements in FX tech). It remains a great action sequence, though, and adds one new twist to future cars – a steering wheel that could be passed easily moved from left to right-hand drive and back again.
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Repo Man (1984)
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We could have included Grease in this list, but aside from the fact that the car inexplicably takes off at the end, it’s not really an SF or fantasy film. Anyway, we have our own “unexpected flying car” ending in the form of Repo Man , though it’s debatable you could call anything in Repo Man “unexpected”. This is a film in which some repo men, a gang of Mexican car-thieves and a government secret agent are all in a race to find a 1964 Chevrolet Malibu with some dead aliens in the boot, that’s being driven around Los Angeles by a crazy scientist. By the time it glows green and starts hovering, you can accept anything.
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The Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer (2007)
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It’s called a car, so we’ve included it, but is the Fantasticar really a car? It’s more like a really small personal jet. But in the film version there’s a huge, lovingly-photographed Dodge logo on the bonnet, so the product placement guys obviously felt it was car enough to make some money out of. The Fantasticar first appeared in the Fantastic Four comics in issue three, but it was rapidly updated in issue 12 for the reasons given below…
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Danger Mouse (1981-92)
Right, we avoided animated series up until now because they open the floodgate to things like The Jetsons and Catbus (not that there’s anything wrong with Catbus, but we have to draw the line somewhere – no animation pun intended). However, it would be criminal not to mention Danger Mouse’s Mark III flying car. It may look like some basic exercise in origami but it is seriously cool. Completely road worthy (as long as it doesn’t fall down any potholes) it has telescopically extending wings that pop out of the sides when Danger Mouse presses a button on his wrist controller. A nippy little thing, it flits around like demented swift, which, combined with the fact that Danger Mouse liked to drive around with it open topped, meant that his trusty sidekick Penfold was always conscientious about using his seat belt.
