10 Whimsical Facts About Pixar’s Cars

My kids love “Cars”. They would watch it five times a day if I let them, but as I am trying to be a good parent and limit TV watching, we compromised and they only watch it twice a day – every day. It’s been more than a month now, and they’re still not tired of it.

So it was inevitable that one day, I just had to wonder how old Sally must be if she talks about missing the Route 66 that existed “forty years ago”, and just what the HTB stickers on Chick Hicks stood for.

And as I tried to find out, here are other Cars trivia I came across:

1. Lightning McQueen’s number 95 stands for the year Pixar released Toy Story.
2. Chick Hick’s sponsor, HTB, stands for “Hostile Takeover Bank”.
3. The real name of The King, Dinoco’s Golden Boy, is Strip Weathers. His design is based on the Plymouth Superbird, a car produced only in 1970.
4. In Sally’s story to McQueen when she first showed him Wheel Well Motel, she recounts how Radiator Springs looked so different 40 years ago. That leads us to believe that she had been there at least that long. Sally’s car model, however, is based on a 2002 model of the Porsche 996, three years old at the time Cars was released.
5. Doc Hudson moved to Radiator Springs after his great crash in 1954, more than 50 years earlier. He met Sally in Radiator Springs when she ran away from her fast-track California life, which must have been more than 40 years ago.
6. Route 66 is a real-life road now called Historic Route 66, colloquially known as the “Mother Road” or the “Main Street of America”, and runs from Chicago, through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and ends at Los Angeles, California.
7. The song Route 66 has two versions in the movie – one by Chuck Berry, and another by John Mayer for the film’s credits. From the day it was first recorded by Nat King Cole, the song has had more than 60 versions from different artists, including Natalie Cole, The Rolling Stones, Perry Como, Bob Dylan, and Bing Crosby.
8. The voice of The Sheriff is played by Michael Wallis, who also happens to be the writer of the book “Route 66: The Mother Road”.
9. Fillmore’s character was based on Bob Waldmire, a Route 66 artist and vegan who owns a VW microbus that looks very much like Fillmore.
10. If you look at the U-Drop Inn in Shamrock, Texas, you’ll swear you were looking at Ramone’s body-art shop.