Say Super Luxurious Omnidirectional Whatchamajigger fast five times.
Volo Auto Museum has an amazing selection of movie cars, including the 2003 S.L.O.W. or Super Luxurious Omnidirectional Whatchamajigger from the 2003 movie The Cat in the Hat. Anyone can take just one glance at this contraption and know it’s the perfect mode of transportation for Halloween, attending a comic convention, or celebrating Dr. Seuss Day.
Driven by Mike Meyers, who played everyone’s favorite top-hat-wearing cat, this whacky car actually cost Universal Studios a whopping $1.2 million to build. That might sound insane, but this is no flimsy movie set piece. Instead, it’s a meticulously-crafted one-off vehicle.
While this Super Luxurious Omnidirectional Whatchamajigger might look like a car you could only drive slowly in a straight line, it actually can get up to 47 mph, thanks to an electric motor. Just remember, electric cars were almost unheard of in 2003.
The design is a mixture of a car, a plane, and a boat. Considering the Cat in the Hat likes to use crazy inventions to solve what should be pretty straightforward problems, it seems only natural he would have an unnecessarily complicated car.
Herald Belker headed up the creation of the Super Luxurious Omnidirectional Whatchamajigger, with Tom Fischer’s special effects crewing doing the construction. You know Belker’s work from the vehicles in Minority Report and other movies. Everything about this vehicle was custom built, including the fiberglass body with the spray-on aluminum finish and African mahogany paneling, which combined to make it look like a Chris-Craft speedboat from the WWII era.
Funny enough, this movie car is driven by remote control. The rearview mirror is a camera used to help a technician see where the car is going. That technician could then communicate via radio with the person sitting in the driver’s seat.
At 23 feet long, the Super Luxurious Omnidirectional Whatchamajigger is pretty amazing to see in person. The red and white stripes on the nose is mesmerizing to stare at, and you could spend some serious time examining the many other details. It’s obvious this was not put together haphazardly, but instead was finely crafted to create just the right aesthetic effect for the movie.
