A Brief History of the Hollywood Sign...
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| Did you know the Hollywood Sign used to say Hollywoodland? |
Here are a few facts about the Hollywood Sign:
- It stands 45 feet high and 350 feet wide (today, without the LAND)
- It's located on Mt. Lee in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains
- It was built in 1923 and originally had 13 letters
- It was an advertisement for the Hollywoodland housing development nearby
- The letters were made of sheet metal painted white
- The sheet metal was riddled with holes for wind resistance
- Each letter was supported by wooden poles
- The letters used to be outlined in lightbulbs
- At night the sign blinked in three illuminated sections: HOLLY-WOOD-LAND
- It was only meant to stay up for eighteen months
- Residents liked it, so they left it up
- In the 1940s the city voted to restore it and make it permanent
- They restored it and removed the LAND portion
- The restored version had no light bulbs; spotlights illuminate it to this day
- It was restored again in 1978, spearheaded by singer Alice Cooper
- 9 different sponsors paid for one letter each to repair
- In 1932 an actress named Peg Entwhistle commit suicide off the H
Here are some pictures of the sign that I took from way up in Griffith Park.
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| This one's kinda bad because I had auto-focus on and the camera automatically focused on the branches in the foreground. Lesson learned: Never send a machine to do a man's job... TjH Photo 2012 |
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| ... or don't include crap in the foreground! Still, it seems forty miles away. (I had to cut down three pine trees to get a clear view.) (Sorry hippies.) TjH Photo 2012 |
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| The Observatory high atop Griffith Park. TjH Photo 2012 |
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| The awesome view of Los Angeles from away up in Griffith Park in Them Hollywood Hills. TjH Photo 2012 |
I drove up to Griffith Park because I thought I'd be closer to the Hollywood Sign. True, I was closer to it height-wise, but now I was too far to the east. I wanted to go right up to it. I found a website that shows how to hike from Griffith Park to the Hollywood Sign but I think it's not... well... official. It's not sanctioned. I think you have to go through private property and no trespassing signs and all that. Not only am I the kind of guy who would get caught and thrown in jail, or worse yet, fined, but I'm also the kind of guy who would probably have a heart attack and die trying to hike there.
They say the real Bat Cave is up that way somewhere too. At least the hole in the rock where they shot the exterior scenes of the Bat Cave in the 1966 TV version of Batman. There were directions on the internet about how to hike there, too. It's in a place called Bronson Canyon. It's not a real cave, it's a man-made tunnel, but they use it a lot in movies. I don't know why I'm talking about it. I didn't even go there. Just another reason to post another picture of Yvonne Craig, I guess. I'm not even a big Batman fan. I was just smitten with Bat Girl as a kid and I guess you never get over your first smit. Hey, Smit Happens. |
| Batmobile leaving the Bat Cave at Bronson Canyon in Griffith Park |
Anyway, I was glad I went to Griffith Park. It was a gorgeous day and it is an awesome park, being way up in the hills. I walked around up there for about an hour, then on the way back down the hill I parked my car and walked on a path that had another neat view of the city.
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| Here's my car as I was coming back down the hill from Griffith Park where I spent half the morning. You can see LA away there in the background. There's a little path across the road along a deep deep cravice. TjH Photo 2012 |
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| Here's the view from the edge of the cravice. I think this is looking at West Hollywood(?) Incidentally, there were no pumas in the cravice, if you wondered. (That's an obscure joke and I will not bother explaining it.) TjH Photo 2012 |
Okay, y'all are gonna think I'm one of them comic book affician-- efficienad-- affliction--- nerds, but I swear I'm not.
My trip to Hollywood was indeed based on a lot of nostalgia, as I love old movies and I grew up with 60s TV, but I didn't come out here intending on seeing the Bat Cycle at The Petersen Museum, or spending the morning walking around the park where The Bat Cave is located, or rekindling my schoolboy crush on the Bat Girl...
Having said that...
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| Ed "Big Daddy" Roth's The Outlaw TjH Photo 2012 |
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| The Tom Daniel designed Bat Cycle TjH Photo 2012 |
-- Tom Daniel
-- Ed "Big Daddy" Roth
-- Dean Jeffries
-- George Barris.
Below are some examples of these gentlemen's work from the 1960s, right here in L.A.
My Childhood Idols Were Car Designers,
Not Baseball Players
Tom Daniel
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| Tom Daniel designed a lot of the Hot Wheels I played with as a kid... Top Row: The Batcycle, Grampa Munster's Drag-U-La, Tom in 2005 Middle Row: Paddy Wagon, Red Baron, Ice T Hot Wheels Bottom Row: Actual Red Baron Show Car, The Munster Koach |
Ed "Big Daddy" Roth
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| Ed Roth was a cartoonist ("Rat Fink") and car designer... Top Row: Ed in the 1950s, Beatnik Bandit (which was also a Hot Wheel) Bottom Row: The Mysterion, The Outlaw (Model Kit) |
Dean Jeffries
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| Dean Jeffries -- If he did nothing else, he's a hero for creating The Monkeemobile... Top Row: The Green Hornet's Black Beauty, The Mantaray show car Middle: Peter Tork, Mickey Dolenz, and Davy Jones in the Monkeemobile 2011 Bottom Row: Dean Jeffries in the late 50s (with a friend), The 1966 Monkeemobile GTO |
George Barris
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| George Barris designed the Batmobile, but his shop built dozens of TV cars... Top Row: Sonny & Cher's matching custom Mustangs, The Munster Koach Bottom Row: George and Bob Kane -- creator of Batman -- by the 1966 Batmobile, George in the 50s |
Not like anybody's reading this blog, but if somebody was, they may have noticed that I included The Munster Koach in both Tom Daniels' photo collage as well as George Barris's. This is where Kustom Kar Kulture gets a bit Konvoluted. (Heh-heh!)
George Barris is known as the "Kustom Kar King" and is oftentimes credited with designing cars he didn't design, like The Munster Koach and The Monkeemobile. Mr. Barris (with all due respect) didn't actually "design" these cars. He may have been involved in the BUILDING of them. Sometimes he just OWNS them. Both Tom Daniel and Dean Jeffries, I believe, at one time or another worked for Barris, but went out on their own later. The story I hear from Tom Daniel is that Tom drew up the designs for The Munsters cars when he worked for Barris, but he didn't work there when it came time to build them, so Barris and his team finished the project and made the Munster Koach a reality.
Dean Jeffries designed and built The Monkeemobile at his own shop. BEFORE The Monkees, Dean was a pinstripe and paint guy for Barris. Many years later, Barris bought the Monkeemobile to add to his TV Kar Kollection which included The Batmobile and The Munster Koach and The General Lee and The Knight Rider. He would take these cars to car shows and lend them to auto museums around the world. Pretty soon, people just assumed he designed all these cars.
He sold The Monkeemobile in 2008 at the Barrett-Jackson auction for $360,000!
Nevertheless, George Barris is a legend in the Kustom Kar industry and I think he's even responsible for spelling custom and cars with a K.
I visited his shop -- Barris Kustom City -- on Riverside Drive in the Toluca Lake area of Los Angeles (North Hollywood, I think?) and to this day it's truly a fully functioning body shop and garage.
It's not a museum (though it does have an indoor showroom). It looks like any body shop in Anytown USA: half-painted cars sitting around, "get-to-later" projects behind the fence. But it's BARRIS! This is where the magic happens! I wish I could have been here in the sixties to see what they were working on... "I guess I just wasn't made for these times..." ~ Brian Wilson & me.
So, I'm walking around the building, in awe that I'm actually AT George Barris's Kustom City! And I walk around back where some mechanics are gathered, working on a car, and I ask, "How do you get into the showroom?" And the guy says, "You need a key." I thought he was being a smart aleck, but I laughed, and said, "Okay. Do you have a key?" Then he laughed. "Oh no! They don't let ME have a key." I said, "Well, is it open to the public?" He said, "Yeah, they let you in when they're here, but they're all in New York right now."
What? Didn't they know I was coming today? Couldn't they have left a key under the mat?
So I asked the guy (he was being nice and friendly), "Is the Monkees car in there?" (I didn't know Barris sold it in 2008). The mechanic said, "The Batmobile?" (He must get the Batmobile question all the time. He was Hispanic but he seemed to speak pretty good English.) I said, "No, The Monkees car." He said, "Oh yeah, that's in there!" I said, "Can I see it through a window or something?" He said, "No, it's in the storage room, in the back, on the other side of the wall. You can see the Batmobile through the window." I was actually kind of disappointed. I'd seen Batmobiles before. There's like 5 of them floating around. This one I figured was the MAIN one. So I took a picture of it through the glass.
I wasn't that impressed to see The Batmobile, really, because as I said, they made about 5 of those. There's 3 originals from the TV series and a couple extra they made to send to museums around the country. There's one in Volo, Illinois, and another one in Roscoe, Illinois. So there's two Batmobiles within 90 minutes from where I live.
In fact, here's a photo of me and my friend Mike sitting in The Batmobile in the Movieland Historic Auto Attractions Museum in Roscoe! I don't know if this is a replica or an original. (Speaking of Chevy Chase and Walley World, the Movieland museum in Roscoe also has one of the Wagon Queen Family Trucksters from the movie Vacation! on display! Small world.)
When I got home from Hollywood and did some more research on Barris Kustom City (I do my research AFTER I visit a place; I'm kinda bass-ackwards that way) I discovered that Barris sold his Monkeemobile in 2008. So what was the mechanic thinking when he said it was in the storage unit behind the wall? I bet he thought I was talking about The Munster Koach. Because THAT indeed is in there. Here's a link to Truckin' Magazine's Website. They have actual pictures from inside Barris Kustom City. Check it out but come back here!
So I didn't get to see the Munster Koach or The Monkeemobile. Or Bat Girl. But here's a picture of her just for the heck of it...
George Barris is known as the "Kustom Kar King" and is oftentimes credited with designing cars he didn't design, like The Munster Koach and The Monkeemobile. Mr. Barris (with all due respect) didn't actually "design" these cars. He may have been involved in the BUILDING of them. Sometimes he just OWNS them. Both Tom Daniel and Dean Jeffries, I believe, at one time or another worked for Barris, but went out on their own later. The story I hear from Tom Daniel is that Tom drew up the designs for The Munsters cars when he worked for Barris, but he didn't work there when it came time to build them, so Barris and his team finished the project and made the Munster Koach a reality.
Dean Jeffries designed and built The Monkeemobile at his own shop. BEFORE The Monkees, Dean was a pinstripe and paint guy for Barris. Many years later, Barris bought the Monkeemobile to add to his TV Kar Kollection which included The Batmobile and The Munster Koach and The General Lee and The Knight Rider. He would take these cars to car shows and lend them to auto museums around the world. Pretty soon, people just assumed he designed all these cars.
He sold The Monkeemobile in 2008 at the Barrett-Jackson auction for $360,000!
Nevertheless, George Barris is a legend in the Kustom Kar industry and I think he's even responsible for spelling custom and cars with a K.
I visited his shop -- Barris Kustom City -- on Riverside Drive in the Toluca Lake area of Los Angeles (North Hollywood, I think?) and to this day it's truly a fully functioning body shop and garage.
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| Barris Kustom City in the 1960s. Note the Santa Monica Freeway directly behind the building. |
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| Barris Kustom City 2012. Still in operation. TjH Photo 2012 |
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| In the tradition of Grauman's Chinese Theater, George Barris scrawled his autograph and left a handprint in the wet cement when they replaced the sidewalk in front of his shop in 2007. TjH Photo 2012 |
What? Didn't they know I was coming today? Couldn't they have left a key under the mat?
So I asked the guy (he was being nice and friendly), "Is the Monkees car in there?" (I didn't know Barris sold it in 2008). The mechanic said, "The Batmobile?" (He must get the Batmobile question all the time. He was Hispanic but he seemed to speak pretty good English.) I said, "No, The Monkees car." He said, "Oh yeah, that's in there!" I said, "Can I see it through a window or something?" He said, "No, it's in the storage room, in the back, on the other side of the wall. You can see the Batmobile through the window." I was actually kind of disappointed. I'd seen Batmobiles before. There's like 5 of them floating around. This one I figured was the MAIN one. So I took a picture of it through the glass.
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| The Barris Showroom through the looking glass. Friggin' doors were locked. I felt like Chevy Chase when he drove cross-country to take the family to Walley World and it was closed. TjH Photo 2012 |
I wasn't that impressed to see The Batmobile, really, because as I said, they made about 5 of those. There's 3 originals from the TV series and a couple extra they made to send to museums around the country. There's one in Volo, Illinois, and another one in Roscoe, Illinois. So there's two Batmobiles within 90 minutes from where I live.
In fact, here's a photo of me and my friend Mike sitting in The Batmobile in the Movieland Historic Auto Attractions Museum in Roscoe! I don't know if this is a replica or an original. (Speaking of Chevy Chase and Walley World, the Movieland museum in Roscoe also has one of the Wagon Queen Family Trucksters from the movie Vacation! on display! Small world.)
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| Mike (left) and me (right) sitting in The Batmobile in Roscoe Illinois. TjH Photo 2005 |
So I didn't get to see the Munster Koach or The Monkeemobile. Or Bat Girl. But here's a picture of her just for the heck of it...
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| Yes, I realize she's in her 70s now. But what's that got to do with THIS picture? |
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