The Corvette Summer was a strange, strange movie, as strange as the Chevrolet Corvette in it, although there are stranger ones. The movie featured Mark Hamill, post his Luke Skywalker fame, and Annie Potts, whom we know as MeeMaw in the series Young Sheldon.
Consider the plot: Hamill is Kenny Dantley, a high school senior from Southern California who loves, lives, and breathes all things cars. His shop class project involves a build, so he makes a Corvette Stingray with a right-hand drive. Why? Well, we’ll get into that later.
Sadly, the vehicle gets stolen and Dantley finds that it has reached Vegas. So he decides to go and retrieve his car by hitchhiking, considering he has no wheels. He gets a ride from Vanessa (Potts) who has dreams of becoming an escort and calls herself a prostitute-in-training.
Needless to say, the plot was weak and the movie weaker still because all is well and good in the end. The guy gets the girl, and his car, and returns home the hero. Despite the not-so-stellar performance of the movie at the box office, it’s the car, ridiculous as it may be, that turned into a far more memorable thing than the movie itself.
So here’s the story of that strange Corvette from Corvette Summer, and where it is now.
The Strange Corvette Build
The actual car underneath all that body paneling was a 1973 Corvette C3 with an L48 5.7-liter V8 engine, the base model, that made 190 horses and ran on something that was called a Turbo 350 transmission. The Turbo bit was nothing but marketing lingo and had nothing to do with a turbocharger at all. Of course, there were two cars involved.
One of the cars had been rear-ended and ended up in a junkyard, ostensibly to be crushed and killed off. But the Producer Matthew Robbins and Director Hal Barwood found it, took it off the junkyard for cheap, and then sent it off to Korky’s Kustom Studios to be actually built, along with the other one.
By the end of the build, it hardly looked like a Corvette anymore, period. The fiberglass nose was pointy, to the point of being witchy and on either side, there were square, almost Caprice-like headlights. The hood scoop also bore sawfish like teeth on either side with little mesh screens. It was turned wide body with wider fenders to accommodate a set of turbine wheels. Two pipes on each side are joined together behind the front wheel to form a muffler.
Dick Korkes’ engine was kept stock but an Edelbrock dual-quad high-rise was added in along with a pair of vacuum secondary Holley carbs as well. The transmission and drivetrain were also kept stock. The frame was rigged to allow the mounting of a movie camera and the hood was also converted into a flip type.
Now, we did mention the cars were a right-hand-drive, why was it so? Apparently, for the driver to get close to the girls on the sidewalk, sprockets and a chain from a Harley-Davidson motorcycle were connected the end of the steering shaft to the box, and this contraption remained out of sight on the left side of the car.
The Reception Of Corvette Summer
The Corvette Summer stalled. No, not the car, just the movie. Unlike MGM’s Grease that cost only $6 million to make but earned a whopping $160 million, this one cost $9 million and raked in only $15.5 million in the US and some $36 million worldwide.
The movie’s bombing was a result of the plot. As far as the car was concerned, people either hated it or loved it at first sight, with no feelings in between. It didn’t look like a Vette, was OTT in styling, and had pipes running on the side without any noticeable increase in power. The one good thing was that they were not destroyed during the movie production and went on to have a colorful transactional history.
Where Is The Corvette Dream Now?
Corvette Summer came out in 1978 and the car was mostly forgotten and in the hands of private collectors till in 2011, Volo Auto Museum announced that it was auctioning this car off, along with more zany movie and TV cars.
Yet again, the only thing known is that it was picked up by an Australian private collector, and the last we heard of it from the Facebook page dedicated to this car was in 2015 where one was restored to make it look different from the movie car. In essence, the Corvette Summer was taken out of the Corvette.
The second car was owned by Mike Yager of Mid America Motorworks in Effingham, Illinois and then sold in 2009 to a private collector.
The original mold of the car is now part of the collection of the National Corvette Museum, so at least something is still handy enough for a look-see.
Sources: LSXMag, Autoweek