Sam And Dean Winchester Car
'Supernatural' Impala is a big-block powered demon hunter
This black Impala is an automotive star on the Supernatural TV series and it's not just a prop
Somewhere out beyond the small town of Ashcroft, B.C., a winding, lonely canyon road runs through hilly ranchland like a mountain creek made of sun-baked tarmac.
Stand here on the scrubby grass and gravel of the shoulder, and listen carefully. Something is coming: an approaching roar. It sounds like thunder. It sounds like the battle-cry of an archangel.
It sounds like Armageddon.
Suddenly, there it is, with a glint of chrome and the dusty black paint of an old road warrior. It's 18 feet of badass – a 1967 Chevy Impala hardtop powered by a 502-cubic-inch big-block, slammed down on a built Hotchkiss performance suspension. The V8 rumbles like a bowling ball stuck in an industrial dryer and there's a guy at the wheel with a grin so big the top of his head might come off. He stomps the throttle, the big-block howls and the Impala lunges forward. It's the best job in the world.
"They strapped on a camera and told me to just go drive around," says Jeff Budnick, picture car co-ordinator for the filmed-in-B.C. television show Supernatural , "Most fun two weeks of my life."
We're standing next to the Impala in question, hunkered down on its tuned suspension and oozing charisma despite slightly shabby paint. Budnick found it in Colorado, with just 12,000 original miles on the clock, and built it into a monster. It's what the film industry calls a "hero car," used for closeups, and it and its siblings are tucked away on an industrial lot in Burnaby, B.C.
Supernatural has been filming in B.C. for about a decade now. Over the years, the film crew has gone from a tight professional group to something approaching a family. About 85% of the original core staff still remain, and Budnick's been there since the beginning.
The story of his start in the business is equal parts luck, hard work, and sheer destiny. A car collector since the tender age of 14 – his first classic was a Ford Galaxie – Budnick's always had something interesting in the garage. He made a decent living running his own neon sign company, and started putting together a personal fleet, just for fun.
One day, while driving his '59 Cadillac, Budnick was flagged down. "They asked if they could rent my car for a show," he says, "I figured, hey, why not?" That show turned out to be the first season of X-Files .
Hanging out on set with his Caddy, Budnick suddenly found himself handling car wrangling duties, and then those of a car co-ordinator. Before he knew it, X-Files was three seasons deep and he was the go-to guy on any number of local movie and television productions.
"I like the challenge," Budnick says, "I love getting a call at 11 o'clock saying, 'I need a Ferrari in an hour.'" While he did assist on more than one feature film, television's demanding, relentless schedule seemed an even better fit. Then Supernatural came calling.
In a nutshell, the show is halfway between The Dukes of Hazzard and Buffy the Vampire Slayer . Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles play Sam and Dean Winchester, professional ghost and demon hunters, protectors of the innocent and no friend to the – you guessed it – supernatural.
Like any good picture-car, the Impala is more than just background transportation. It's the former possession of the Winchester boys' long-lost father, and works as a sort of four-wheeled homestead for the pair. One episode talks of Legos and green plastic army men being crammed in the ashtray as the boys grew up on the road, the Impala the lone constant of their nomadic existence. In another, Dean fixes the Impala up after a bad crash and roars off in search of his brother to the strains of AC/DC's Back in Black .
Up front, the Impala has bench seating, a line-lock for doing big, smokey burnouts, and a cassette deck for Dean's classic rock favourites. The trunk is big enough to stow a body, painted with mysterious sigils that function as a demon trap, and crammed with all sorts of apparatus to smite the unholy. At least, it is after the prop department loads it up – today there's nothing in there but a tiny crucifix and a tire-iron (based on past episodes, the Winchesters could probably make do).
Week after week, with a creak and a clunk of solid Detroit iron, the pair clamber into their Impala, crank up the tunes, and head out on another adventure. You half expect Waylon Jennings to start narrating.
"It's so loud, the sound guys really hate it," Budnick says of the big-block hero car, "The boys both love it though, so they keep asking for it." After nearly 10 years on set, the Impala is as much a member of the Supernatural film-crew family as it is a third Winchester.
There are seven Impalas used in shooting, if you include the "buck," a movie-set special that's chopped up into moveable sections so that cameras can fit – with scaled-down modern camera technology the crew doesn't use this one much any more.
Budnick walks through the stories of the other six cars, most of which he hunted down and brought back to life. A 1967 Impala four-door hardtop is a fairly rare machine in its own right, made rarer still by the fact that many people didn't hang on to them.
Still, here's a car that came out of the San Juan Islands with just 70,000 miles on the clock. Jeff found the car, took a ferry out to meet the previous owner, paid the guy the $2,200 asked, cranked it over and drove it right back on the ferry.
Another car survived for nearly four decades in and around New York. Budnick pops the hood on one of the stunt cars to show off a built-up Chevy 350, and points out the addition of a third pedal that locks up the rear wheels for doing slides. "This poor girl's had a rough life," he says, leaning on the Impala's dusty flank, "We rolled it onto its roof once, crushed the windows down to here. Still, I keep fixing them up." On some of the other cars you can see dents in the sheetmetal, battle-scars from fight scenes.
Budnick's daily duties aren't limited to the Impalas either – that would be the job of a picture car wrangler, to get the cars onto the set and keep them running. As a co-ordinator, Jeff's job involves overseeing the stunt and hero Impalas, but he's also responsible for finding cars and matching them to the characters.
Every eight days, the Supernatural crew cranks out another new episode, meaning Budnick is faced with a fresh challenge every week. After sitting in at a script reading, he sorts out a number of vehicles that might pair well to a character – a blacked-out luxury sedan for a conniving demon, a beat-up Gremlin for a hapless jokester. Next he meets up with the director of that week's particular episode, armed with a series of suggestions and pictures, and a database of over 2000 cars.
After so many years working closely with the team, Budnick has a pretty good grasp on what the different directors are looking for. "Guy Bee [one of the directors], he's a real Dodge fan. I always have to make sure I have a couple of old Dodge muscle cars in the background."
Budnick's own personal collection includes some classic Mopar muscle, built-up Chevy hot-rods, and over a hundred other cars from Checker Taxicabs to old cop prowlers. His pride and joy is a rare 1940 Willys Coupe, a car he literally once rescued from a burning building; when Budnick's house caught fire a number of years ago, he and a firefighter friend were able to push the Willys out of the garage and to safety.
With a spin-off already in the works, an enormous fanbase, and nine seasons in the can, Supernatural is a homegrown success for the Canadian film industry. Fans of the Impala can buy a full-sized replica car for around $40,000 from a builder in Kansas, or wait for the upcoming Greenline version in a desk-friendly 1/18 th scale.
As filming came to an end for this season, the Supernatural film-crew all celebrated with a wrap party. There was good food, good drink, and live music too, as crew members got up on stage and cranked out the rock n' roll.
Just as happens every week during filming the team came together with an easy familiarity, gelling with their musical instruments the way they do behind camera, crane, and boom mike. Budnick played bass, he and the band delivering a driving backbeat as various guest singers – including Jensen Ackles – got up to sing lead.
The band's name?
They're called the Impalas.
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Source: https://driving.ca/vehicle-types/classic-cars/supernatural-impala-is-a-big-block-powered-demon-hunter
