We’ve done the Sandman before, but without the real thing. Now that glenh has posted this at the cohort, we can gaze on its goodness and let our imaginations be swept away. Looks rather like a gen-1 Monte Carlo sedan delivery…or is my imagination getting away?
It most definitely looks like a ’71 Monte Carlo front clip grafted on another vehicle!
The bumpers stick out more but I gotta wonder if this is how GM helped amortize its tooling costs for the Monte.
BTW the ’70’s my all-time fave MC. It always looked best with the rounder headlight bezels….
The ’71 Monte Carlo grille is strikingly similar… I see a delightfully colored Monte Carlo Granada Rally II Poison Pinto mashup. The blue stripes against the green color are my favorite feature.
Reminds me of a pimped out pinto
I (and many of you, likely) immediately thought of Mad Max when I saw the image…
That’s the first thing I think of whenever I see ANY vintage Australian car: was that car in Mad Max?
That’s intriguing – I’ve seen Mad Max numerous times and am a fan; and being a Kiwi, the Holdens and Fords are all part of our carscape. But the Holden van you’ve pictured is wearing headlights from something else. The indicators are Holden, the grille is Holden, the headlights aren’t – and although they bear a resemblance to the WB Holdens, they aren’t. Of course that sort of trivia won’t matter to anyone else lol! EDIT: I wrote this before noticing Bryce had already pointed out the incorrect headlights – well-spotted Bryce!
I think they are lights from an XC series Ford Fairmont- I’ve seen one or two customisations over the years , usually with the Statesman front clip as well!
The grille below the bumper is custom too.
Mad Max was made well before the WB model came out. The van also has murals etc, they must have borrowed it from somebody at the time. who knows, hopefully they repaired the scratches from the chain on the roof rack, and broken grille etc before returning it. MM1 was made for a proverbial shoe string, eg it was director George Miller’s own Mazda Bongo van that was destroyed in the Toecutter chase early in the film.
HX?HZ Statesman front panel on the red van thats not a WB front at all silly me just had a headlight change
My Sister’s first boyfriend with a car had one of these, tricked out inside, with a picture of Princes Leah on the sides and called, predictably, stormTROOPER. It used to give my Father kittens when he took her to the drive-in in it.
I had several Holden Panel vans no sandmans though, That appears to be a HX model while the image Ed found is a WB with incorrect headlights, Nice find and in much better condition than the beater HQs I used to drive.
The milder term for a vehicle like this was “shaggin’ wagon” I believe. The harsher version rhymed with truck, as in “f— truck.”
That said, GM seemed to do a lot of mashups of styling cues in their overseas products. Witness the Opel Diplomat coupe of the mid-1960’s that had a ’63 Chevy nose grafted onto a 7/8 scale ’63 Grand Prix body. Or the second-gen Diplomat B with the ’65 Riviera front clip. Ford and Chrysler did it, too.
It definitely gave the cars a family resemblance worldwide.
Also known as a “finger bowl”! This facelift of the cleaner styled HQ series was apparently due to a new head of design at GM-H who wanted more of a ‘little Cadillac’ look to the Holden. It was not well loved by younger stylists who were moving to a more European look in line with the big Opels.
There was apparently a perception that the HQ “looked small”, which compared to the Valiant it did, so the squarer front end would address that.
This one is just begging for Tom Klockau to do a Miniature CC. I recall there being a Matchbox model of a Holden ute, though I’m not positive it was the one pictured here.
I actually have one that survived my childhood. Mine was beige with a red interior and carried two plastic motorcycles in it. It is actually in good shape, but the motorcycles are long gone!
It is a Ute though, not a van. As a kid I actually thought it was some custom Monte Carlo truck.
I’ll have to see if I can find it 🙂
The one I recall was red and I know for sure it was by Matchbox. I knew the bottom said it was a Holden, but as a kid I would just pretend it was an El Camino.
There are some ‘good’ (ie not childrens toys) models of various Holden utes and vans available, including stickered-up as the Sandman
Just this evening I saw a beautifully-restored Chrysler Valiant “Drifter” panel van heading home in traffic, Chrysler’s equivalent to the Sandman. An incredibly rare machine, with only about 2500 panel vans being built in total, and only a small number being the tricked-out Drifter. No chance to take a photo unfortunately.
A genuine Drifter, you’re not wrong about them being rare. Might be the only one left now. Its interesting that a few magazines in Australia and facebook pages are getting hold of old photos of customised panel vans (or pano’s as some like to call them) from the show cuircuit in the mid 70’s to early 80’s. Let’s face it, they had great airbrush paint jobs and “idiosyncratic” customisation to the panel work, I think it is sad that that part of our car culture disappeared.. There seems to be even a bit of an effort to get some of these show cars back on the circuit.