Dark Knight Madness: Inside the Bat-Pod!
If you haven't seen The Dark Knight yet, you've got a lot coming to you.
Including -- new Bat Gadgets!
Among the coolest -- Batman's new motorcycle, the Bat-Pod.
Popular Mechanics has gone inside the creation of the Bat-Pod.
From the piece:
Enter the Bat-Pod, a motorcycle-ATV hybrid that lands eye-popping stunts sans CGI, a hand-built bike that fires grappling hooks—while shape-shifting.
After picking through junkyards, a local Home Depot and that surprisingly hands-on garage, Nolan and production designer Nathan Crowley took a month to assemble a foam-and-plastic model for Batman's new ride—enough like the Tumbler, but with a heavy-hauling look of its own. "But to actually have a look at what we were thinking, we went down to Warner [Brothers] and got the front wheels off the Batmobile," Crowley says.
When he first laid eyes on the Bat-Pod mockup, special effects supervisor Chris Corbould wasn't sure if his director actually knew anything about motorcycles. But that's what makes The Dark Knight at once a throwback superhero movie and a green-screen-light breakthrough in digital Hollywood: It turns fantasy into reality. And building a concept vehicle without a team of automotive engineers was one of its biggest challenges. "The gauntlet had been thrown down," Corbould says.