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
00:0001.10 When someone says it can't be built, we've got to build it.
00:0401.10 At Parker Bros. Concepts in Florida, the only restriction is imagination.
00:0801.12 The first rule at Parker Bros. is if we are going to build it, it is going to be
00:11a drivable vehicle.
00:13The client list includes celebrities and Hollywood movie studios.
00:2501.27 Mark and Shannon Parker design and build incredible concept cars.
00:28custom motorbikes, and stunning drivable recreations of the most outlandish movie vehicles.
00:38Somebody comes to us and says, I want a car with some rims and a ground effects and a paint job and we're like, that's boring.
00:45You know, we want to show people that you can do things that have never been done before
00:50and push the envelope a little bit and create things that are kind of iconic.
00:58Shannon's the designer. I mean, he comes up with these ideas.
01:01A lot of his inspiration, I think, comes more from comic books and movies
01:05and he'll come up with these just really outlandish ideas and then bring me a drawing and go,
01:10hey, let's build this and I'll look at it and go, what were you thinking?
01:15He thinks if he can draw it on paper that I can build it out of metal.
01:17Unfortunately, you know, it's a little more difficult than that.
01:20Everything we build is drivable, so then I have to come up with the way of taking his idea and his inspiration
01:26and kind of 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, you know,
01:33a lot of times when I draw it, it's too far out there and he has to kind of rein me back in a little bit,
01:38but it's that collaboration that makes the vehicles turn out so cool.
01:42As 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 Ghostbusters.
01:56But the most stunning is the Assault Tumbler from The Dark Knight Rises.
02:00We had to build every inch of this from scratch.
02:03The frame, the chassis, the body, the interior, the suspension, the wheels, the glass.
02:09I mean, pretty much all we could buy was a motor and it was pretty tricky.
02:14Now, the whole chassis and body is a tubular chassis and it's all steel construction.
02:20Not roomy inside, but it's pretty comfortable actually, you know, and it drives out really well.
02:26We had to add a lot of little cameras. There's a lot of tiny little micro cams all over it
02:31and there's seven or eight video screens on the inside because there are a lot of blind spots.
02:37Yeah, the gas mileage on this thing is not the greatest. You know, it does have a Corvette engine in it.
02:42Because of the shape of it, there's not enough room to put the motor in the front where it would normally go.
02:49So what we had to do was put the motor in backwards.
02:52So the motors here and the transmission is actually inside the vehicle
02:56and that runs into a gearbox that drops down and then the drive shaft comes back underneath the motor and back to the rear end.
03:05The turbine here, which we originally had hooked up with a propane system to blow flames out,
03:12but we realized that that was dangerous and stupid and a lot of people almost got hurt.
03:18So we disconnected that. Normally we can't get over about 30 miles an hour with it
03:22because all the people around it. It's kind of hard to go fast when you're being crowded in,
03:26but if you wanted it to, it could definitely move because it's got a good engine in it.
03:30How can you go wrong? This is just one of the coolest cars that was ever even dreamed up.
03:35So occasionally we get to take it out and drive it around and have some fun with it.
03:40When I first saw the Tumbler, I thought it was just the coolest thing
03:43and I think it's awesome that it actually has a New York City Gotham tag on it.
03:47It's really, really cool.
03:48If people can look at that and go, oh, that's nice, but keep passing by, we probably didn't do our job right.
03:54If people have to stop what they're doing as they're driving down the road, yeah, we've done something right.
04:01The brothers aren't sure how much they spend building the Tumbler,
04:04but how much would they be prepared to sell it for?
04:07I personally wouldn't sell it. To me, it's that cool and it took that much time and effort to build it.
04:17I mean, why would you get rid of it? What, are you crazy?