You wake up one morning and decide it’s the perfect day to watch a movie about a kid being hunted by a robocop from the future fighting with a muscle man wearing leather. You spend your days after school bumping that new Duran Duran tape before watching a match of that cool new sport called Jai alai. You’ve seen the fall of the Berlin Wall, the boom of the space age, the end of the Cold War, and the prime of men shrieking into microphones while they’re squeezed by their leather pants. You’re an 80s baby, and you’re absolutely (probably) loving it. Was it the best time to be alive? Flip a coin, there’s plenty of good and bad. But what there’s certainly no shortage of a metric shit ton of cool cars to put up on your bedroom walls, and the Petersen Automotive Museum knows that.
The museum’s newest exhibit is called “Totally Awesome: Cars and Culture of the 80s and 90s,” and, in classic Petersen fashion, it’s an incredible, exhaustive exploration of the cars themselves, as well as the fashion, music, and, believe it or not, even arcade games. As a ’98 baby, I don’t have any of the nostalgia so many of you likely do, so instead of waxing poetic for a time I know so little of, I’ll let the photos do the talking. A picture is worth a thousand words after all, right? Now, let’s sit back and embrace the Jheri curl on your noggin and the neon coursing through your blood, and let’s get this peek at the ’80s and ’90s.
The first thing you see in the exhibit is a TV showing off arcade games of the time, as well as a Countach with open doors ready for you to take a peek; it’s a great welcome to the exhibit.
My first exposure to this car was under the name Infernus from the best game of the PS2 generation: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. And on the note of that game, the exhibit has what feels like the game’s entire soundtrack playing as you walk through the hall. If you can think of a song from those 20 years, they’re probably playing it. It’s quite immersive.
So it’s time for me to confess: I haven’t seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; it just wasn’t something that ever played in my house as a kid. Sue me! But it’s still cool seeing the actual picture Ferrari sitting there that, unbeknownst to me, was a replica. Kinda cool! And observant viewers of this particular photo might notice that I’m shooting through the cockpit of another vehicle to frame it. What might that vehicle be?
Yeah. They’ve got the De Lorean there too. The one that sent Martin Mcfly back to the past or whatever that movie is about. Point is: there’s cinematic royalty in these halls!
It should be no surprise to those who have read my previous article about my daily-driver that I’m gonna talk about a Corvette, but this one here is a particularly interesting model from ’86 called the Corvette Indy. It had an IndyCar engine in the back that made 600 horsepower, and was a concept car filled with pretty much all the future tech you could think of at the time. I’m putting it under this tab, “avant-garde,” because I also wanna talk about the fashion on display at the exhibit.
One thing the exhibit leaned into was a post-Malaise era now filled with color and energy, and while that’s certainly on display in the cars and art of the time, it’s also seen in the clothes that felt like concept cars in their own right. Some of the pieces were crazy, aspirational designs that were never meant to be widely released, but loved nevertheless as a proof of concept. And on top of that, they had some that compared and contrasted pieces from the 70s and their newer, 80s counterpart to see how the styles evolved. Check it:
Okay, but back to the cars. Next to the Corvette Indy, they also had the baby Viper, also known as the Copperhead, flanked by the Pontiac Stinger. The Copperhead felt like exactly what it was, a baby Viper, with an interior reminiscent of the bubble-core/Frutiger Aero/Y2K Futurist era tech filled with color and round designs. The Stinger, on the flip side, felt like something straight out of a B-movie you’d see on the Scifi channel, but I still loved it!
But quick question for you: what the heck are these?
What would a car museum be without some of the insanely opulent, unrealistic, should-be-illegal-because-of-how-fast-they-are cars of the time? We’re talking the Vector M12 owned by our very own Beau Boeckmann, the Lotec C1000 that had a heavily modified Mercedes V8 making 1,000 horses, and the Cizeta-Moroder V16T that was just…intereting. Hagerty made a good video on it a bit ago, if you care to learn more about it.
And even these aforementioned well-dressed mannequins think that the McLaren F1 is a cool car. They can’t keep their eyes off it!
I’m really exercising restraint here because this was an unexpected part of the exhibit that I fell in love with, if for no other reason than that beautiful Jeep Honcho that I learned about for the first time in the exhibit. You can probably make out that angular white truck on the right side of the frame that may or may not share an engine with its Countach sibling, but the one I want to show off is this:
Look how cool this Syclone’s paint job is. That thing was supposed to be the official Pace Car (or Truck, rather) for the Indy 500. Can you imagine?
As always, the Petersen is incredibly comprehensive to the point where I couldn’t talk about it all even if I wanted to, so instead, I’m gonna give you a couple more photos just because I’m a big fan of The Petersen, and they’re really helpful when it comes to getting great historical article-fodder:
They’ve got two cars representing the world of motorsports: an old Group B Audi Quattro and a Panoz hybrid endurance racer.
And I wasn’t kidding when I said that there’s a bunch of video games there, too! You can buy coins so your little runt kids can play while you drool over the cars in the room. But come to think of it, it’d probably be the other way around: you adults would be drooling over the games of your childhood, reminiscing on the times you had with your friends at the mall, meanwhile, the kids remain unimpressed because they can play Fortnite on their phone whenever they want.
Who knows, maybe everyone’s drooling! All I know is that this exhibit was very cool, and I just wanted to share that with you.
