TWO BROTHERS are building and driving custom cars straight out of the MOVIES. Marc and Shanon Parker have a street-legal Batman Tumbler, Optimus Prime and Ecto-1 parked inside their shop in Port Canaveral, Florida. The duo started their business four years ago, and already have an incredible fleet of cars straight out of movies like Batman, Transformers and Ghostbusters.
Category
🚗
MotorTranscript
00:00When someone says it can't be built we've got to build it.
00:04At Parker Brothers Concepts in Florida the only restriction is imagination.
00:08The first rule at Parker Brothers is if we're gonna to build it, it is going to be a drivable vehicle.
00:13The Client lists include celebrities and Hollywood movie studios.
00:21You only see this kind of stuff in the movies, it's awesome.
00:2401. Mark and Shannon Parker design and build incredible concept cars, custom motorbikes
00:30and stunning drivable recreations of the most outlandish movie vehicles.
00:3602. Mark and Shannon Parker
00:40Somebody comes to us and says I want a car with some rims and ground effects and a paint
00:44job and we're like that's boring. You know we want to show people that you can do things
00:49that have never been done before and push the envelope a little bit and create things
00:53that are kind of iconic.
00:5603. Mark and Shannon Parker
00:59Shannon's the designer. I mean he comes up with these ideas. A lot of his inspiration
01:02I think comes more from comic books and movies and he'll come up with these just really outlandish
01:08ideas and then bring me a drawing and go hey let's build this and I'll look at it and go
01:14what were you thinking. He thinks if he can draw it on paper that I can build it out of
01:17metal. Unfortunately you know it's a little more difficult than that. Everything we build
01:21is drivable so then I have to come up with a way of taking his idea and his inspiration
01:26and kind of turning it into something that's actually functional.
01:29It's really kind of a back and forth. We have to tweak it a little bit because a lot of
01:33times when I draw it it's too far out there and he has to kind of rein me back in a little
01:38bit but it's that collaboration that makes the vehicles turn out so cool.
01:43As well as concept and custom builds, they also make replicas of famous movie vehicles
01:48including Optimus Prime from Transformers, the Shredder from Battleship and Ecto-1 from
01:54Ghostbusters. But the most stunning is the Assault Tumbler from The Dark Knight Rises.
02:01We had to build every inch of this from scratch. The frame, the chassis, the body, the interior,
02:07the suspension, the wheels, the glass. I mean pretty much all we could buy was a motor and
02:13it was pretty tricky. Now the whole chassis and body is a tubular chassis and it's all
02:19steel construction. Not roomy inside but it's pretty comfortable actually. It drives out
02:26really well. We had to add a lot of little cameras. There's a lot of tiny little micro
02:30cams all over it and there's seven or eight video screens on the inside because there
02:37are a lot of blind spots. The gas mileage on this thing is not the greatest. It does
02:42have a Corvette engine in it. Because of the shape of it, there's not enough room
02:46to put the motor in the front where it would normally go. So what we had to do was put
02:51the motor in backwards. So the motors here and the transmission is actually inside the
02:56vehicle and that runs into a gearbox that drops down and then the drive shaft comes
03:01back underneath the motor and back to the rear end. The turbine here, which we originally
03:09had hooked up with a propane system to blow flames out but we realized that that was dangerous
03:15and stupid and a lot of people almost got hurt so we disconnected that. Normally we
03:20can't get over about 30 miles an hour with it because all the people around it. It's
03:24kind of hard to go fast when you're being crowded in but if you wanted it to, it could
03:27definitely move because it's got a good engine in it. How can you go wrong? This is just
03:32one of the coolest cars that was ever even dreamed up so occasionally we get to take
03:37it out and drive it around and have some fun with it. When I first saw the Tumbler
03:42I thought it was just the coolest thing and I think it's awesome that it actually has
03:45a New York City Gotham tag on it. It's really, really cool. If people can look at that and
03:50go, oh that's nice but keep passing by, we probably didn't do our job right. If people
03:55have to stop what they're doing as they're driving down the road, yeah, we've done something
04:00right.
04:13The brothers aren't sure how much they spent building the Tumbler but how much would they
04:17be prepared to sell it for? I really, I personally wouldn't sell it. To me it's that cool and
04:25it took that much time and effort to build it so, I mean, why would you get rid of it?
04:32What are you, crazy?