Original subtitles

Hey, folks, how y'all doing this fine afternoon?

Why are you talking like that?

I am fine, Jeff Dunham of Dunham Family Motars.

Will you get a great deal or else?

- Or else what, Bubba J? - You're really talking weird.

When people see the car we're featuring in this episode,

I think you can narrow it down to two responses.

Some folks see this...

and go, "Why would anyone need that much bird on a car?"

And then there's the rest of us, who understand that

sometimes too much... exactly right.

We're not talking about subtlety.

It's not about quiet refinement or European handling.

It's about the last muscle car that didn't just survive

the 70s, it owned them. If you know, you know.

If you don't, I think you're gonna love this.

Get ready, Smokey fans. This is the Bandit.

Our 1977 Pontiac Trans Am just like the one

Burt Reynolds drove.

Does it smell like Sally Field?

I don't know.

Throughout time, humanity has been obsessed with getting

places using anything but their own two feet.

We've tried all kinds of things.

Until finally, the greatest invention of all

time, the automobile.

Moron!

These are the Cars That Drove Us.

Flex. Ripped.

Buff. Jacked.

This is the story of Pontiac's ultimate flex.

The Pontiac Firebird Trans Am.

Trans Am, what's your pleasures?

But before we can tell the tale of this fiery bird of

prey of the highway, we need to reverse that big old V8

powertrain out of the garage and back to the times of yore.

Well, I'm going to take you back from 1926 until 1956.

Where General Motors and its multiple subsidiary companies

had a big old problem.

As white-knuckled blue hairs puttered in Pontiacs,

there was a new generation

of post-war fun lovers, with blue-jean pockets bulging

with American dollars, and they were ready to live

life in the fast lane.

First time, younger people had disposable incomes that

they could use on a fancier car.

They wanted something exciting.

Younger people really just wanted something cool.

These kids just wanted to drive fast.

i.e., not one of those old American cars.

Clearly, for General Motors, there was a gap in the market.

For Pontiac to find the strength to truly create

the muscle car, they'd first need to deal with a competitor

who set off a stampede.

Since 1964, over 600,000 former GM customers

bought Mustangs. - GM was caught flat-footed.

Unless we change our ways drastically, customers are

going to do business elsewhere.

And so in the early 60s, General Motors put their foot

to the floor, rebranding Pontiac as

its performance division.

In 1964, when John DeLorean was chief engineer...

Which is incidentally,

Wait a minute, DeLorean?

this John DeLorean.

But that, of course, is in the future.

John DeLorean and a bunch of guys got together and wondered

how they could take an intermediate body car

and turn it into a real go-getter.

So they dropped a bigger displacement motor,

the 389, into a Pontiac Tempest.

This has paid off.

- And called it the GTO. - A purring tiger address.

The muscle car was born.

And Pontiac's muscular realignment was complete.

Basically turned the division around from an old ladies

division to a performance division.

Around that same time, another GM division,

Pontiac's sister company, Chevrolet,

was also trying to keep up.

The minute that General Motors saw the Mustang,

they gave us carte blanche, go.

And that's when we did the 67 Camaro.

A new car that's something else.

An iconic car in its own right, Chevrolet's Camaro,

forged in the volcanic depths of Detroit,

indirectly spewed forth an opportunity

for John DeLorean back at Pontiac.

Pete Estes, the head vice president of General Motors,

he said, "Tell you what, I'll give you the components of

a Chevrolet Camaro, you make a Pontiac."

And soon the Camaro became something else entirely.

Once he got the base car, he started feeding it

the bigger engines, bigger sway bars to give it the handling,

different tires,

all about performance for Pontiac.

Six months later came the Pontiac Firebird in 1967.

And all of a sudden you had a performance pony car.

The Pontiac version was always more aggressive than

the Chevrolet version.

And so with the Firebird, Pontiac was racing to capture

the attention of the younger hard-charging car enthusiasts.

And when I say race, I mean a race.

In what was called the Trans American Sedan Series.

Trans American Sedan Racing.

A battle of the Detroit giants for road racing supremacy.

{Jeff] This competition...

healthy competition,

...was a battle between modified sedans and coupes

from car manufacturers.

Trans Am Championship. Trans Am Racing.

Which was an absolute...

...dogfight.

The drivers are running their cars flat out

in Trans Am races.

And winning this was about more than just the race.

Anybody who knew anything about branding and image knew

the name Trans Am was a bona fide winner.

Now you might be wondering how the Firebird

came to be known as Firebird Trans Am.

They paid for it.

Yep.

They cut a deal with the Sports Car Club of America

to use that revered name, Trans Am,

for just $5 per car sold.

The amount of money that they were going to pay

the Sports Car Club of America was just

a fraction of what that was really worth.

The Trans Am was the fanciest Firebird you could get.

And, boy, was it fancy, but hot.

They took the basic Firebird body, dropped in a bigger

motor, painted some stripes on them, put in a nice handling

package, and Pontiac

brought out the first generation Trans Am.

Man, the car was

just...

It was a beast.

That $5 would prove to be a marketing masterstroke.

Because that first Firebird Trans Am,

despite its limited run...

Built a few hundred of them in '69,

...is still turning heads

and opening wallets today.

Kind of wish I had one of those.

In the early '70s, Pontiac was trying to fan

the Firebird flames.

But just as success was on the horizon,

smoke signals appeared. Or maybe it was smog.

Emissions regulations came about.

Safety regulations came about.

That kind of watered down the muscle car.

Cleaner cars rather than faster cars.

And so GM told Pontiac, don't make

any more of those engines.

We'll put smaller engines in those cars.

But Pontiac's Trans Am was having none of it.

Pontiac kind of went against that order.

And what really made the Trans Am take off was when

they finally stuffed the 455 Super Duty into it in 1973.

Beautiful engine. Has a shaker hood.

When you rev the car, the shaker would move.

And you got the feeling the power of the engine was

right out there in front of you.

Basically stuffing that 455 engine into the Trans Am

at that time was basically giving the

federal regulators the bird.

Now, if you're going to give the federal regulators

the bird, you'd want it to be a good one.

And thus far, the Firebird badge was falling

a little short of its potential.

The chief designer for Pontiac, he always thought it

looked like a dead bird.

Well, young, novice graphic designer Norm Inouye...

My first job out of school was General Motors.

At the same time, they were developing

the Trans Am.

The chief designer wanted something on the hood.

I remember being on the drafting table trying to

figure out what I was doing.

Nothing was done by computer back then.

But he had his vision.

A soaring, majestic bird of prey for the new Trans Am logo.

And that's when somebody came up and said,

"You working on the screaming chicken?"

The screaming chicken.

- Ah, the screaming chicken. - It was an in-house joke.

It sort of got stuck.

Because the bird looks like it is

screaming because there's flame

coming out of the mouth and all that.

Perhaps Norman's chicken was the perfect new

Firebird emblem.

They were painting it on the hood of the car at

the paint shop at Bill Mitchell.

Bill Mitchell was the head of General Motors in 1970,

the big boss.

He saw it being painted, and he hated it.

He just hated it.

Well, now it was definitely a dead bird.

And I left GM in '70, late '70.

By that time, I thought that whole project had been killed.

Until John Schinella became...

Chief designer.

...in 1971.

Like being a doctor, you know?

Your name's on the door, and Dr. Schinella, almost.

Dr. Schinella began probing, discovering

Norm's flaming chicken design,

collecting dust in the paint shop.

I said, "Well, you know, the bird is kind of

the American eagle."

We have a bird as an emblem.

I said, "Why don't we do a big one on the hood?"

So he wanted to bring it back to life.

And I said, "Let's make a decal and put it on my car,

and I'll drive it up and down Woodward to test it."

The reaction, I couldn't believe it.

People were...

saying, "Where'd you get that? Where do I get mine?"

"I want one for my car."

And I said, "OK. I think we got something."

And we had a meeting with Pontiac.

Now let's become more specific.

The vice president at the time said, "How many of you like

what's going on?" So

they talked to sales, hand went up.

They talked to marketing, hand went up.

They talked to engineering,

down. They talked to the plant, down.

They wanted no part of it.

John and the screaming chicken were plucked.

2 Pontiac's new head of design, John Schinella,

was waging a one-man campaign

to get a giant flaming bird plastered across

the hood of an upcoming brand new Pontiac

Firebird Trans Am.

And I knew that they were trying to convince me

they shouldn't do that bird.

But if anyone needed to be convinced,

it was John Schinella's boss.

Because when it came to that bird...

He just hated it.

...Bill Mitchell was in a flap.

- But John had a plan. - Yes.

He knew Bill liked a black car with gold trim.

John slapped a gold Firebird on the hood of

his boss's dream car.

A black Trans Am with gold stripes.

And parked it outside of Mitchell's office.

The trap was set.

Mitchell, when he liked something, he licked his lips.

Like that.

He said, "Bill, I got something to show you." He said,

"What do you got, kid?" Something special.

Hopefully some lip balm.

- The eagle... - Screaming chicken.

...had landed

on the hood of second-generation Trans Ams.

Turned out that virtually everybody who wanted a Trans Am

wanted the bird.

Could it be that the first Trans Am had been

out Trans-Amed?

You know, having stripes on the car was one thing,

but the screaming chicken, bold and brash,

and we started taking notice.

Oh, don't worry. Everyone was taking notice.

Some people made fun of it, thought it was ridiculous.

Even Norm had doubts.

I never told anybody that I did that screaming chicken.

I was half him embarrassed that I did it.

But the people who bought

those cars thought it was wonderful.

Only in the 1970s would a giant flaming chicken on

the hood of your car fly.

Well, fly it did, out of the Pontiac dealerships.

It seemed nothing could stop the Trans Am rise to

supercardom, except for maybe this little issue.

Gasoline stations ran dry.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries imposed

its boycott and raised prices more than 300 percent.

This industry wide issue had meant that muscle cars

had been muscled out.

And the pony cars weren't faring much better.

But as for Pontiac, the bird was proudly raised

aloft once again.

The 1976 Special Edition further cements Trans Am's

legacy as one of the most iconic muscle cars ever.

If you drove a black and gold Trans Am, you were a badass.

Consider Bill Mitchell's lips licked.

But the Trans Am that actually turned the most heads

in '77 was actually a '76. - Yeah.

Let's go back a year.

Hal Needham, who was out in Hollywood.

He was casting cars for his next big movie.

He spots the black, and he says, "That's it,

I want that car." Now, the car was already

in production as a limited edition.

Well, it just so happened that Hal Needham had

a movie in production as well.

Smokey and the Bandit.

And so a '76 Special Edition fitted with

a front end from the yet-to-be-released

'77 model was ready for its close-up.

When that car drove off the back of that truck...

Almighty, would you look at that?

...we got goosebumps.

We said, "That's us." That's our car.

There.

And who better to drive the coolest car in America than

- the coolest man in America, - Burt Reynolds,

who was the number one box-office hit at the time.

And who wouldn't want to be like Burt Reynolds?

Sorry, I don't want to get married.

- Does this thing move? - Oh, yeah.

Burt said publicly, "The car was the real hero."

It did performance things you can't do.

Sales of the Trans Am soared.

And it just took it to the top.

To the top of the box office in 1977.

Holy [horn honks]!

Just behind that space opera about the bratty farm boy

from Tatooine.

But I was going into Tosche Station to pick up some

power converters. - All right, shut up.

By that time, I was real proud of the fact that I designed it.

Big impact culturally, big impact on sales over

at Pontiac. - That's a win-win.

But if you can believe it,

the Trans Am still wasn't done winning.

1979 Pontiacs.

In 1979, Pontiac sold over 100,000 Trans Ams,

the highest total in any Firebird model year.

Nothing even comes close.

Having masterfully navigated the regulation-heavy '70s,

largely by, well, ignoring them.

As the '80s approached, the question was...

would it all still be worth the hassle Hoff?

2 The Trans Am of the '70s was bold, gold, and...

Had the loud, crazy, screaming chicken.

And then as we move into the 1980s, there is a new focus

on technology.

People have computers in their house.

They're playing video games at home.

Space invaders to cause that roar.

Trans Am of the '80s reflected that.

In 1982, Pontiac launched

its futuristic third generation.

Firebird Trans Am.

The strategy was to go a more sophisticated route.

You can feel the anticipation in the pit of your stomach.

We wanted the car to be the most aerodynamic,

sleek-looking Firebird ever.

Create a car to conquer the wind.

A bullet.

The older cars suddenly seemed kind of bloated in comparison.

Eh, it's probably the beers.

But if the muscular, handsome shape of Bert Reynolds

and the iconic black and gold Trans Am of the '70s

wasn't your style, then perhaps

David Hasselhoff would take your fancy.

Come on, girl.

NBC wanted Pontiac's third generation Trans Am to be

the model for their new series...

- The Knight Rider. - But...

they didn't know what the car looked like, because it was

before the car came out.

They want to know what it looks like.

And I said, "Hey, that's giving away secrets." I can't do that.

You know, I can't tell that,

because we didn't have any pictures then.

And he said, "Can you kind of draw up what a Knight Rider

car would have liked with the shapes?"

so I took a napkin and drew it.

Knight Rider, a shadowy flight into

the dangerous world of a man who does not exist.

From that sketch, Schinella worked with

Knight Rider producers to create the show's iconic

Knight Industries 2000 Kit, a Trans Am...

You're approaching a dangerous curve.

that talked back. - Kit.

- Yes? - Shut up.

Anybody from Generator and remembers watching that

show when they were a kid?

Good grief.

People from around the world, that show had a huge impact.

From 1982 to 1986, Knight Rider was a ratings

winner for NBC.

But what about the third generation Trans Am that

inspired Kit? - A lot of it sold on styling.

It looked very fast.

I feel like there's a butt in here somewhere.

- But... - There it is.

The image that was being portrayed by Kit did not match

what the car could deliver.

You've probably begun to form

a psychological attachment to me.

And by now, the federal regulators had

finally caught up to Trans Am.

That 455 Super Duty was nowhere to be seen or heard.

Pontiac had dropped her own 5-liter engine.

They had to use a small block Chevrolet, which by that time

was choked with both fuel economy

and emissions equipment.

So you had a look-fast, go-slow car.

But there was another problem.

It was more thanks to the design.

The car had several quality problems.

It squeaked. It rattled.

- What is this? - It had electrical problems.

Unfortunately, quality and performance of the Trans Am

took a back seat for GM.

They sort of forgot about it.

Schinella didn't, okay? He kept on trying.

Me, I was disappointed in the Gen 3.

But not all was lost. In 1987...

Good night, Irene. What is that?

The Pontiac Firebird Trans Am GTA.

Here comes excitement!

With its V8 engine, the Firebird Trans Am flew in

the face of its fancy European competitors.

And then, as the '90s rolled around, a brand new fourth

generation Trans Am rolled off the assembly line.

This is the new Trans Am.

- This is the LT1. - But...

Come on, you knew the but was coming.

The sporty car market itself was declining.

Fuel economy was everything.

And everybody was going MPG.

Pontiac was going the other way.

Their slogan used to be, "We build excitement."

Well, they hadn't built a lot of excitement in a long time.

And the world was no longer interested in the mighty,

powerful icons of the past.

All of us who grew up with muscle cars and sporty cars had

unfortunately moved on to minivans by that point.

The last Trans Am rolled off the assembly line in 2002,

but its legacy remains.

The Trans Am made an impression on those of us

who grew up and came of age in the 1970s.

And it was the wheels that you had that defined you.

This thing is just raw power. There's nothing nanny on it.

You can spin out if you want to.

That's what Burt Reynolds did.

I would have never believed that we were still talking

about that bird.

I'm pretty proud of that, actually.

Sometimes I get very, I'm going to get emotional,

I get emotional about that car not being around anymore.

Sorry.

I feel good that these people love what my team and I

did together. It's a big accomplishment.

It's something that won't go away in my time.

Because while some cars get older, the Trans Am just

becomes more legendary.

Long live the Screaming Chicken!