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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.
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When someone says it can't be built, we've got to build it
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At Parker Brothers Concepts in Florida, the only restriction is imagination. First rule at Parker Brothers is if we're going to build it, it is going to be a drivable vehicle
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Their client list includes celebrities and Hollywood movie studios. You only see this kind of stuff in movies. It's awesome
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Mark and Shannon Parker design and build incredible concept cars, custom motorbike
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custom motorbikes and stunning drivable recreations of the most outlandish movie vehicles
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Somebody comes to us and says, I want a car with some rims and a ground effects and a paint job and all, and we're like, eh, that's boring
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You know, we want to show people that you can do things that have never been done before
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and push the envelope a little bit and create things that are kind of iconic
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Shen is the designer. I mean, he comes up with these ideas
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A lot of his inspiration I think comes more from comic books and movies And he come up with these just really outlandish ideas and then bring me a drawing and go hey let build this and I look at it and go what were you thinking He thinks if he can draw it on paper
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that I can build it out of metal. Unfortunately, you know, it's a little more difficult than that
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Everything we build is drivable. So then I have to come up with the way of taking his idea and his
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inspiration and kind of turning it into something that's actually functional. It's really kind of a back and
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forth. We have to tweak it a little bit because a lot of times when I draw it, it's too far out there
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And he has to kind of rain me back in a little bit. But it's that collaboration that makes
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the vehicles turn out so cool. As well as concept and custom builds, they also make replicas
1:46
of famous movie vehicles, including Optimus Prime from Transformers, the shredder from Battleship
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an Ecto 1 from Ghostbusters. But the most stunning is the assault tumbler from the Dark Night Rises
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We had to build every inch of this from scratch, the frame, the chassis, the body, the interior, the suspension, the wheels, the glass
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I mean, pretty much all we could buy was a motor. And it was pretty tricky Now the whole chassis and body is a tubular chassis and it all steel construction Not roomy inside but it pretty comfortable actually
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It drives out really well. We had to add a lot of little cameras. There's a lot of tiny little microcams all over it, and there's seven or eight video screens
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on the inside because there are a lot of blind spots. Yeah, the gas mileage on this thing is not the greatest
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You know, it does have a Corvette engine in it. Because of the shape of it, there's not enough room to put the motor in the front where it would normally go
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So what we had to do was put the motor in backwards. So the motors here and the transmission is actually inside the vehicle
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and that runs into a gearbox that drops down, and then the drive shaft comes back underneath the motor and back to the rear end
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The turbine here, which we originally had hooked up with a propane system to blow flames out
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but we realized that that was dangerous and stupid and a lot of people almost got hurt
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so we disconnected that. Normally we can't get over about 30 miles an hour with it
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because all the people around it it kind of hard to go fast when you being crowded in but if you wanted it to it could definitely move because it got a good engine in it How can you go wrong This is just one of the coolest cars it was ever even dreamed up so occasionally we get to take it out and drive it around and have some fun with it
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When I first saw the Tumblr, I thought it was just the coolest thing, and I think it's awesome that it actually has a New York City Gotham tag on it. It's really, really cool. If people can look at that and go, oh, that's nice, but keep passing by
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We probably didn't do our job right. If people have to stop what they're doing as they're driving down the road, yeah, we've done something right
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The brothers aren't sure how much they spend building the Tumblr, but how much would they be prepared to sell it for
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I really. I personally wouldn't sell it. Yeah, yeah. To me, it's that cool, and it took that much time and effort to build it
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So, I mean, why would you get rid of it? What are you crazy
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