Dan Aykroyd Used a ‘Blues Brothers’ Car to Pick Up Women
Dan Aykroyd has starred in a number of movies featuring some pretty iconic props, and it turns out that he actually kept one of them. Weirdly, he didn’t take home Ray Stantz’s proton pack from Ghostbusters, or his latex Coneheads scalp, or even the black leather bondage ensemble from Exit to Eden. But he did drive away with one of the cars from The Blues Brothers.
The most famous car in The Blues Brothers was, of course, the Bluesmobile, Elwood and Jake’s decommissioned Mount Prospect police car. Technically, there were several Bluesmobiles in The Blues Brothers — 13 different Dodge Monacos were used in the stunt-heavy production, but only five of them housed Aykroyd and John Belushi. They were originally California Highway Patrol cars, repainted to resemble black and white Mount Prospect vehicles.
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The Blues Brothers filmmakers also bought 60 old cop cars for the destructive chase sequences. Since the cars had to be reused in multiple scenes, the production ran a “24-hour body shop” near the West Side of Chicago in order to stay on schedule.
While an actual Bluesmobile would have been a great collectible, reportedly all 13 of them were “destroyed” during filming. Even the Bluesmobile in Illinois’ Volo Museum is a high quality replica.
There have long been rumors that director John Landis gave Aykroyd a car once filming wrapped. Well, Aykroyd just sat down for an interview with the YouTube show Jake’s Takes, and addressed this very topic. “The neatest piece of memorabilia that I’ve ever owned from the movies was a fully-marked Illinois State Police car, with siren and lights and plates and everything,” Aykroyd explained.
Of course, the Bluesmobile didn’t have a siren, so it seems that Ayrkoyd kept one of the many other cop cars used during filming.
Weirdly, he just used it as a regular car while living in Manhattan, and was somehow never busted for impersonating an officer. “I drove (it) in New York for three years after the movie. Fully-marked. Driving down the streets of New York. Nobody looked twice. ‘What is a guy serving a warrant from another state?’” Aykroyd reasoned.
The Saturday Night Live star even used the car to meet women. “I used to pick up dates in it. It was fantastic,” Aykroyd explained, before arguing that it wasn’t actually the car that impressed people. “All the ladies that I ever dated back then were so cool, I could have picked them up in a garbage wagon and they would have been fine. Magnificent women, all of them.”
So what happened to this piece of movie history/Dan Aykroyd dating history? “I sold it, and it ended up at a racetrack somewhere.”
Apparently, this car has been quite a topic of conversation amongst Blues Brothers super-fans over the years. Back in 2012, users of a message board devoted to Bluesmobile replicas noted that another fan was selling a Bluesmobile online, claiming that it was used in the movie, just not as a Bluesmobile. It was supposedly the same car that Aykroyd kept, which he then gave to his brother-in-law at the time, who had the car painted to match Jack and Elwood’s ride.
It’s unclear whatever happened to this particular car, or whether or not the current owner has found that it’s improved their love life.
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