He’s thinking about all that sweet cash he’s going to score in a year or two from making Rocky films.

Death Race 2000

I resisted this because I felt too many of you had already seen it, so it would not increase film knowledge in the group to post it. Finally I did come up with two things this crowd may not have known.  The story of the sequel, and a little bit about the cars.  So I got over myself and posted it.

I mentioned a while back in a thread that there was a sequel to Death Race 2000, and I didn’t mean the new movies.  The sequel’s title was Deathsport.  The idea was to do Death Race with motorcycles. Corman himself pitched it and his creative team hated it.  Death Race 2000 was a really great film, there was no reason to crap on it with a bad sequel. Corman was not happy with that answer. He gave his team two weeks to write and pre-produce something better.  Voila! Deathsport, starring David Carradine.

Corman didn’t like the new Deathsport script at all.  He told Carradine not to do it.  Carradine did anyway and said his career never recovered from it.  So now you know the story of the Death Race 2000 sequel that never was.  Do you still want to see it?  If you do, click here…

Every Glib Zoom ends up like this.

The cars of Death Race 2000 are almost as interesting as the plot. Every one of the main cars is customized. Dick Dean supplied the cars, and he used a variety of vehicles. Two Volkswagen-based Manta kit cars (from the LoVette Brothers), a Fiat 850 and Dick Dean’s Shala Vette VW kit did duty as customs.  A smattering of famous people did the customizations, including Dick Dean himself, Dean Jeffries and George Barris.  Rumor has it the cars sold after the movie for more than it cost to make them.  That’s classic Corman.  For “reliability,” Dick Dean sourced the flat 6 cylinder engines and transmissions from Chevy Corvairs in the kit cars.  As a result the kit cars spent a lot of time not running and being pushed around. When they did run, they ran slowly so the cameras had to be undercranked to look fast.  Also, none of them were street legal so you might get a glimpse of Corman himself driving one or two – the stuntmen did not want to get busted driving illegal cars on city streets!

There!  I found two pieces of trivia to add to the general store of knowledge.  So watch!  Or don’t!  Everything is voluntary until some old man in a Vette runs over you while making “bruummm bruummm” noises with his mouth!

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