Jul 19, 2008 03:00 PM
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While the vehicular star of The Dark Knight may be the product of millions of dollars of Wayne Enterprises' R&D work in the movie itself, the reality of the Bat-Pod's creation is much more down to earth: the bike's makers simply stole the wheels from the Batmobile and set to work.
According to a story in the latest issue of Popular Mechanics, the original Bat-Pod mock-up was created by Dark Knight director Chris Nolan and production designer Nathan Crowley from material picked up from garages, junkyards and Home Depot without much thought to how it would actually work:
When he first laid eyes on the Bat-Pod mockup, special effects supervisor Chris Corbould wasn't sure if his director actually knew anything about motorcycles. But that's what makes The Dark Knight at once a throwback superhero movie and a green-screen-light breakthrough in digital Hollywood: It turns fantasy into reality. And building a concept vehicle without a team of automotive engineers was one of its biggest challenges. "The gauntlet had been thrown down," Corbould says. While the filmmakers and Warner Brothers have been tight-lipped about any vehicle specs in the movie, Corbould clearly had to reinvent how a motorcycle's systems make it run. Nolan and Crowley's original sketches had no tailpipe, but anything with a motor needs an outlet for exhaust.
That wasn't the only problem with reality; Batman's outfit caused another worry:
Another cool design element: Those footrests are actually the bike's radiator. But like the exhaust, the normal components had to be hidden to keep the bike's profile true to the original concept. Then there was what Corbould saw as a potentially disastrous—and dangerous—design flaw: Without mudflaps, would Batman's cape get caught up in the wheels?
It's surprising that they didn't just decide on the Bat-Pogo-Stick somewhere during this process, isn't it?
Dark Knight's Bat-Pod Took Up-Armored Road From Garage to Set [Popular Mechanics]
Send an email to Graeme McMillan, the author of this post, at graeme@io9.com.
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
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