I have seen a lot of nice 1955-1956 Packard engine compartments, but I have to say this is one of the nicest I have seen in a long time. As we used to say back in Detroit when I was growing up, "...clean as the board of health!"

I don't know if the paint is original, but that Scottish Heather on the firewall sure is accurate and gleaming beautifully...which is the way original nitro-cellulose lacquer looked when new. Nice.

Anyway, the colors and finishes are accurate... the ground strap is in the right position under the battery holder bracket, the oil-bath air cleaner decals are accurate and in the right positions. Wow. The only thing I see here missing is the anti-short extruded rubber shield over the regulator connections (almost all V-8 Packards I see today are missing this part).

This is one gorgeous 1956 Four Hundred! I had two duplicate sister cars in these colors, one with factory air and wire wheels (long before repops were available). I last saw it in the 1970s in Reseda, California.

As for Caribbean hoods and dual quads, I can assure you that I knew of at least 2 or 3 1956 Four Hundreds running around Southern California in the 1970s. One of them lived in Long Beach. Another lived in very wealthy town of San Marino. My two cars came from San Marino via Pasadena.

Back in the 1970s I was told by a former owner that his car "came that way" and was ordered via Earle C. Anthony dealership. Furthermore, I was also told by a former ECA parts & service man that ECA kept both Caribbean carb set-ups with batwings and factory air kits on-hand at the two main SoCal ECA dealerships. I suspect they also swapped a few hoods.

Of course, there were other Four Hundreds running around with Caribbean hoods on them... and I knew who put the hoods there! One of them is sitting out in the desert today and I'm sure there will one day be stories about it. A lot of years have gone by and folks have short memories.

Anyway, I will also say that many-possibly most or all- postwar Packards delivered CKD/KD to Mexico were distributed via ECA. I know this because the ECA Controller-who I knew and interviewed-told me that they (meaning ECA distributor personnel) had inspected and loaded KD cars on trains to go to Mexico. And you know, EC certainly loved to jazz-up Packards and encouraged buyers to order the unusual! Something to think about in the equation.

On a final note, I remember at least two dark metallic blue 1956 Patricians that had full leather interiors (yes FULL leather) and factory air. One of these turned up many years ago in the 1970s at a PAC National in Illinois. The other was from New Jersey (sadly, I last saw it in a junkyard). While I know the fate of the second car at least as far as the boneyard, I have no idea what happened to the other car-which as I recall belonged to a Chicago stockbroker.

Anyway... info offered for what it's worth....

Oh... and yes there is a partial shot of Ed Macauley's specially painted/specially colored Caribbean-ized Four Hundred in the upcoming Creative Industries book!

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The evaporator core box that mounted under the instrument panel was developed (as I understand it) at the insistence of both James Nance and Earle C. Anthony.

But we need to remember that the parameters for the space available, the design of the firewall... and the design layout of the ventilation system were all fixed by the fact that they already existed in the Briggs body design. And after all, the 1955 and 1956 Packards were still just a disguised older Briggs body.

So yes, perhaps we can say that the V-8 air conditioning unit underpinnings were somewhat of an afterthought... but what else could they be? They had to work with the bones they were given.

And yes... the flange on the firewall was attached differently for dealer-installed factory air units.

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Certainly not all vintage cars you see (or think you see) crashed and trashed in movies and TV are real... especially in more recent years. It all depends.

If the folks running the film have a scene in the script that calls for an old car to be smashed... and they can pick up something that kinda-sort looks like it, they may just do that. Car wrecks on film can be expensive. So? If they can pick up say, for instance an old Packard for $1500... that plus the cost of wiring it to blow is the cost of the smash-up. Rather than the huge expense of purposely fabricating a fake vintage car. Done deal. Again, a matter of dollars and cents.

Check out one of the cars destroyed in the James Bond film, Dr. No. The car you may think is going down the mountainside in flames is not really what it appears to be. Just something the kinda-sorta looks like it. Of course the Continental that they squished in Goldfinger was real-minus the engine (watching that one for the first time indeed brought a tear!). Of course, the little cube of crushed metal that villain, Odd-Job returned with to Auric Goldfinger's Lexington, Kentucky ranch obviously was too small to actually be the Continental-at least not a whole one.

On the other hand, some movie shoots do indeed go all out and spend the money to make replicas that may get smashed or be used to give the look of something it isn't on camera. For instance, I had friends on the set of the filming of the Tucker movie and there were a few replicas mixed in with real Tuckers. I even have some photos of a couple of the fakes under construction and sitting on the set.

In the 1970s I was also on the set of the filming of a Harold Robbins book... The Betsy... only in that film they mostly dressed up other cars (at least one of which was a Packard) to look like cars from what was called "The Bethlehem Car Company"...all imaginary. They used everything from Ford LTDs to Mercedes to Packard and more... and disguised them all. I still have the grilles and hood ornaments off of some of the cars that I saved. They tossed most of the disguise parts after the filming was over.

So it just all depends.

There have always been companies that rent cars to the movies-especially in Southern California. In fact, PAC's Earle C. Anthony PMCC region once had a member whose sole business was renting cars for movies, TV and commercials. I also rented a few to the film industry.

And yes, the cars are merely props and considered expendable by some folks. It depends on who you have overseeing the movie... and the cars... and your personal car if you are renting.

Several decades ago, back when I was in college I would sometimes get a fee to go with these cars to make sure directors and stage hands didn't wreck them. One director wanted to drill giant holes in the back of a Packard I was with... then said, "Hey... we've got people who can fix it back so you'll never know!" Right. Another said... "...just turn it in for insurance!"... when something that was irreplaceable was severely damaged. There was no emotion, no historical sentimentality, no fretting about whether something that was original could not be replaced... since it was merely just another prop and expendable-or replaceable so he thought. It was all just dollars and cents to some of these folks. But others had deep appreciation. In particular, one of the guys with the Burbank Studios was a really caring and concerned transportation manager.

I had to get several permissions and became SAG eligible. I babysat the cars and sometimes drove them. In one particular MOTW with Gig Young, Bob Crane and John Savage I took a prewar Packard ambulance and we shot for about a week or so. One of the big guys on the set came over at lunch time and asked me what I thought of the cars they were using. I told him I thought everything was fine, except the scenes were supposed to take place in the late 1940s. I told him it would be a neat trick to have a 1952 Pontiac sitting in the main shot! They weren't too happy to hear that, but the '52 Pontiac later went away.

Another time, my good buddy's black 1956 Patrician (with air) was rented for a TV series about a police detective in New York (it was shot on the sets in SoCal). I was not available to go with the car, and that was ominous.

When the Patrician came back it was barely running. It was quite apparent the car had been overheated ...and the front had been very poorly repainted-with a bug in the paint! My friend found buckets of gravel wedged in underneath the car and the Torsion-Level no longer worked. Oh, and the tires. The whitewalls were scuffed up pretty hard. We finally figured out what had really happened when the show aired a few months later. We were mortified. Burn-outs, drifts, skids...they did them all-and more...with the car in chase scenes and posing as a Russian ZIL. Yes, they figured nobody would know any better-all the way around the equation.

Anyway, yes, there are companies that rent cars to the movies and it can be a very pleasant and even lucrative experience-providing that you have someone to watch over your vintage vehicle when it is out of your hands. Just remember, for a lot of people, a car is just a piece of machinery... or a prop. You can't expect that people will all feel emotional about your baby. Even if they've seen old cars a lot (and most people on movie film sets already have), this does not mean they have either expertise in handling vintage vehicles or emotional attachment to them.

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Nope. Absolutely not! Absolutely not. The silver gray customized Panther shown in this video is a morphenized never-was... made out of what used to be Kennard Voyle's former Panther. Sad, too because this is (or WAS) ACTUALLY PANTHER #1, not #3.

For the record...
? It never had an all gray interior and this interior is done wrong anyway. NO PANTHER EVER had an all-gray interior.

? It never had "Mitchell" names on it until it suddenly turned up in recent years in auctions and a museum, morphed with a new paint job and new interior and these names stuck on. It was NEVER that way in it's history.

? The original REAL Mitchell Panther was modified into having 1955 tail lights and still exists today in New Jersey.

? The REAL Mitchell Panther was never silver gray... it was Danube Blue...and yes, color photos indeed still exist. In 1955, the Mitchell Panther was repainted Roman Copper and Corsican Black. Yes, these color photos still exist too.

? The REAL original colors on the car in the video were, yes, Silver Gray (for just a few weeks) and then very bright orangish-red. It ought to be that color today if the present owner wants to do justice to the car and return it to original. The interior was always orangish-red bolsters with silver-gray pleated leather inserts. As in ALWAYS.

? The original "Mitchell" Panther never-EVER had a supercharger.

? The car in this video was actually Panther #1 and the first Panther-Daytona. Why and how it got morphed into what you see now is anybody's guess.

? There were only TWO Panther-Daytonas... these were #1 and #2. The subsequent Panthers were just "Panther", NOT "Panther-Daytona"... and the #3 and #4 cars never had superchargers, nor were they ever called "Panther-Daytona" until recent years when auction companies got ahold of them and started making up their own "histories"...which had nothing to do with the actual histories of the cars.

? The actual number of the engine in this gray morphie is-or at least originally was- "M6000 060" and, as I said, it was Panther #1 before somebody decided to "custo-mod" it.

The correct and original full history of the Packard Panthers was published in The Packard Club's magazine, "The Packard Cormorant" for Spring, 1984, issue #34. The information in that history is still accurate today in 2016... no matter what the auction companies and calendars and books and the internet might be trying to tell us today.

Of course, the real question here is what happened to this poor Panther after it disappeared into the auction world.