HBO’s new series, Lovecraft Country premiere as The interesting reworking of Jordan Peele’s noticed rare and virulent racist HP Lovecraft’s Cthulu Mythos in something that captures the realities of American culture and racism of the 1950s, along with all those creepy monsters with many eyes that old HP loved so much. As a period piece it’s full of some great vintage iron, but I want to focus on the shows now central car because it’s something a little unexpected.
I do not want to give anything away, but I can tell you that the main characters of the show are on a road trip, and one of them has a company that deals directly with travel by car across America, and it turns out that the car used for this purpose, affectionately known as “Woody”, has been a part of things for a while. It is treated with real affection, which makes a lot of sense, in context.
Woody is, as the name already suggests, a station wagon with wood panel. However, it’s not the usual Buick or Ford woody, and it’s not even one of the Big Three – Woody’s 1948 Packard Station Sedan. Yes, that’s right, Packard could not bring herself to call her forest wagon a wagon, because it was something stranger – a forest wagon adapted from her all-steel sedan.
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Unlike most wooden station wagons of the era, the Packard used only actual wooden structure for the tailgate; the wood on the sides of the doors and pillars were simply applied for aesthetics, something that would actually predict the patterns of future station wagons, which would almost all have false, non-structural wood.
The styling of the Station Sedan matches the chubby cheeky look of all the first designs of the post-war Packard, with a small tombstone-shaped grille in the center that was moderately compensated by a series of three chrome grille bars with full width that blended into the bumper, which had another pair of full width chrome beams, supplemented with some large vertical overriders.
You can see that the sedan version has almost the same body panels, with just the roof, side glass / D-pillars, and wooden tailgate unique.
I love the way the rear looks at this thing, with its split tailgate that just looks like one bit too small for the car and has a beautiful clunky hinge setup, allowing several scenes in the show to show in action:
See those big ass hangings in there? It appears that there is a process for multiple steps of levers and arms sliding and pressing to get the tailgate open and closed.
These beasts used Packard’s straight-eighteen Packard connected to a three-on-the-tree transmission, pretty conventional goods for the era. These large, nearly five-liter engines produced about 130 horsepower, which was respectable for the time being, and probably one of these massive tree-slathered beauties could get up to about 85 mph, although 18 seconds lasted up to 60.
The show has a number of old Packard scenes that have become real out, which is exciting to watch, because the handling on these could at best be considered dinghy-like, but the stunt drivers do a fantastic job with them.
These Packards were only made from 1948 to 1950, and were never sold in numbers even close to what the Big Three offered. It would have been easy to throw a much more common wood in this role – in fact, other similar wagons like Buicks are specifically mentioned in other contexts – but I think some sort of underdog was selected.
It somehow fits in better with who the main characters are here – underdogs themselves, certainly not people in positions of power or even control over their own lives, in many circumstances. A well-built, reliable, but unusual car is a good choice.
The series has many other interesting cars, including the usual range of common suspects from Central America 1950 and some more unexpected, such as that Bentley S1 in the mid-late 1950s there. I bet we’ll deal with these more later.
The Packard is going through some rough treatment in this first episode, so I hope we will see it through the entire series. At least that beautiful coordinating capornament, at least. That thing is fantastic.
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