People who took care of some basic maintenance and corrosion protection could see 10 to 15 years of service without too much trouble. Kind of reminds me of a first generation Rabbit/Golf, which Ive always considered the gold-standard for the best styled small car. Show more Yugo America. But with enough TLC (something the average American consumer wasnt high on), maybe they werent so bad (at least a few of them, anyway). The writer of Drowning Mona thought it would be hilarious to fill a 2000 crime caper with Yugo vehicles. Hell, he only paid something like $500 for a beater commuter car and this was in the late 1990s. Also, the GM Colonades from 73-77 were pretty rust resistant as well. There was nothing inherently wrong with the 360, and all the other Japanese manufacturers had a car at the time with more or less similar features. All in all, Monas jaunt into the river could have been described as a pretty fortuitous accident for everyones lives she touched, or in Monas case, bludgeoned. Drowning Mona, Movie, 2000 Pictures provided by: garco, antp, ahight Display options: Also known as: Todos la queran muerta (Spain) Mais qui a tu Mona ? Of course, not wanting to be associated with alleged members of the alleged Romanian Mafia, Bently pulled out. It seems a good use of them. Finallywith a new clutch 400 miles oldit tossed the alternator belt. You know, we have a joke here in ex-Yugoslavia about Yugo: They were an object lesson in the old adage that you get what you pay for. I would suggest you read Jason Vuics book on the Yugowhat he described the Yugo America advance men as finding, had little to do with shortages of raw materials. It was owned by a gentleman named Dave Benton who claimed to be the former engineering manager for Yugo North America. var readyGEO; document.getElementById("unic-gdpr").style.display = 'inline'; Money was a problem; but not the root problem. The faded red one in the piece is for sale- $750. (https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2009/jan/14/cover/#) I remember, as a teenJapanese cars had fit-and-finish second to none; they started and ran smoothly with the primitive emissions controls of the time; but boy, did they rust. Yes they were cheap, but it was a proper car, built properly. Im affiliated with NECC Motorsports, a club that runs time trials at various sports car racing tracks in the eastern half of the USA. Its not like Fiat designs were anything special, quite the contrary in many instances. The last Yugo that we would recognize rolled off the assembly line in November 2008. Any idea where the Fiat 128 stopped and the 127 started in the Yugo? Technically if its going downhill it wasnt moving on its own power. My problem was that I didn't care who killed Mona Dearly, or why, and didn't want to know anyone in town except for Chief Rash and his daughter. No regrets and better than any $1500 alternatives at the time. She was given a Yugo that wouldnt runthe fix was nine dollars. Several actors in this film have ties to the Batman films. But they did. About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators . What is the purpose of door release handles if they break right away (they appeared to be bendable plastic molded around a paper clip), and how did they ever get installed in the first place if they didnt work to begin with? I remember that time very well, it was impossible to find coffee or bananas or laundry detergent etc in the stores, and the industry was struggling to get raw materials. This car didnt want to go into reverse at a standstill. Our Mr. Bricklin also had an idea to start up another company fed by Zastava, this time to be called ZMW. I must admit that I own a Yugo. The lovable numbskulls of Verplanck, New York, are all beside themselves with shock and quiet joy when town bully Mona Dearly dies in a freak accident involving her Yugo, some cut brake lines, and a plunge into the Hudson. i doubt they are still there. I saw one parked on Colorado Blvd. Just started slipping, on a highway as flat as a calm oceanand over the next five hours I had to shift into lower and lower gears just to minimize slippage. During the time the clutch cable was dying, I broke the shifter mechanism, due to the clutch cable dying. With just 25 horsepower (at a cacophonous 5500 RPM), the elfin 360 was the type of cynical exercise that would define Bricklins career in the car business. ), it was quite good. To this day I have never felt a more imprecise,balky shifter. The Proton is only a Malaysian Mitsubishi exactly the same awful car Hyundai built as trhe EXCEL. What kind of car is in the movie Drowning Mona? The cars in the movie were provided by Apple Motors in Denver, Colorado. I remember the lights were tied to the ignition switch so if you left the light switch on, theyd go off when you shut down the car, and back on when you started it back up, and that meant headlights and all, ala SAAB. Though set in Verplanck, "Drowning Mona" was shot entirely within an hour's commute of Los Angeles. Before I moved to Atlanta in the early 90s, we sold off our other cars before moving. I was scarred for her to be driving it. Although it shares some similarities with the Fiat 127, it is actually based on the much more advanced Autobianchi. Make and modelMake and yearYearCategoryImportance/RoleDate added (new ones first)EpisodeAppearance (ep.+time, if avail. Critically, one of her co-workers loved Fiats, and he taught her their quirks-most of which the Yugo shared. One of the sight gags is that everyone in town drives a Yugo, thereby using personalized license plates as a necessity more than anything else.) Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Which, actually, was a very good little car . Rona Mace (Jamie Lee Curtis) is an anagram for "a romance". I also bought a new Yugo in 1989, and had to replace brake master cylinder immediately because brakes would fail after about 10 km on the road. Likewise the Toyotas and Datsuns. Most can be rectified by the shareholders or the Boards of Directors, the shareholders representatives. But the little Yugo turned out to be a lot less than the sum of its parts. He later served briefly as acting Secretary of State during the last months of the first Bush presidency). He was rather sad that after 170,000 miles it had And incompetence does not negate the political reasons, until and unless the failure of management becomes an unavoidable political embarrassment. if(document.getElementById("unic-gdpr")) { The Kei cars, like European microcars in the 1950s and early 60s, made car ownership possible for the masses. A quiet little in-joke indeed, but I mention it so the filmmakers will know their work was not in vain. The movie was directed by Nick Gomez, who, in "Laws of Gravity" and "New Jersey Drive," brought a John Cassavetes touch to working-class crime and confusion. First of all, thanks to Perry Shoar for a very well written explanation of the events of the 70s and 80s that led to the meltdown of Yugoslavia. This is the same scenario as Chrysler- My parents always said that if you get a Dodge in town itll be a lemon, but in the country, itll be a good car because the smaller country dealer relies on repeat business and does a better PDI, ensuring bolts arent missing, and both sides identify the car correctly. parts are easy, I have a new driver side indoor handle ordered that will be here Tuesday. What he saw was an operation that turned out a car designed (and abandoned) by Fiat years before. The philosophy behind Drowning Mona is not good clean fun, or even intelligent nasty fun. Not sure they sold very many. Two cars are in the driveway of a glorious but faded Victorian mansion: The Bertone and a Yugo. Mona Dearly (Bette Midler) is an anagram for "only a dream". After highway driving the gear would refuse to shift, like it overheated being in gear so long, it refused to move. I sold the car to a coworker of my BILs, who drove the car another three years before he totaled it. The blue one had seen much more use than the red one, but it was still a good runner. that stated this town was used as a consumer testing site for the cars. Many years later I saw it, and her, driving down a street near my house. The displacement limit for kei cars was increased to 550cc some years ago. But after that i didnt have much trouble with it, ride wasnt too bad for such small car, power was adequate for normal driving (in fact, compared to my fathers beetle with 1200 cc and 34 HP, Yugo with 55 HP and such goodies like 5-speed gearbox and brake booster feels pretty quick). Or wasting half a grand. Two YUGO watches, new. Disc #1 -- Drowning Mona Play Feature Chapters Setup 5.1 Surround Stereo English SDH Subtitles: On Subtitles: Off Extras - Trailers Drowning Mona Eye Of The Beholder . I took all of the fun stuff off of the red one (Italian Cromodora wheels and the AM/FM Cassette) and put it on the blue one. Wikipedia says that the Yugo quality was satisfactory at the start but went downhill fast and the factory refused to do anything about it. I was listening one Saturday to Car Talk and one of the callers that day to the show was a Catholic priest who drove a Yugo and commented on all the flak he received for his choice of automotive transportation. Cool Cruise CAR SHOW Cruisin' Brea CAR SHOW Cruisin' La Verne CAR SHOW Brea Holiday CAR SHOW Project Home America Flying Deuces is a production, marketing, booking and advertising company. Even those of us raised on rusting U.S. cars from the 60s were surprised by how fast the Japaneese stuff vaporized. . It was only later, when the bean-counters bid out the belts on a cost basis, that they developed a much shorter lifespan. Two Yugo episodes: The first while working on a construction crew in the 1987-88 period, at a project west of Rochester, NY one morning a Yugo rolls onto the lot, out pops a nervous, typical pocket-protector young engineering type, tells us he is out of gas, could anyone give him a ride to his job.at Kodak! So on the line, a worker would have to cut and install and tape it, with about a 25 percent failure rateincorrectly re-connected. It turns out to be murder and Chief Wyatt Rash (DeVito) must investigate. Every vehicle in town that is not a truck is a Yugo, except the police cruisers, which are Plymouth Horizons., And lastly, I recall seeing a comedian on TV talking about Yugos. Having seen pics of the 127, I can relay that the Yugo body is a complete reskin no lines or panels are the same or interchangeable. Second occurred during 1994-95, having changed employment by then, while driving the 50+ miles each morning, Id notice Yugos of different colors pass me on the four lane driven by the same fellow. I was amazed when I rode in one, expecting a bouncy distaster but encountering a surprisingly supple feel of the suspension. I remember listening to Car Talk some 5-6 years ago and a caller came on and said that his Yugo (an 87 I think) died at 150,000 miles, not due to mechanical failure, but due to a Deer. document.getElementById("unic-ccpa").style.display = 'inline'; But youre right that would mean being a business man and not a con-artist. He was absolutely correct. He lost his house, his fortuneAnd the dozens of Yugo GVs that he received as part of his settlement with his bankers. An accident has happened - the Yugo of one Mona Dearly has careened off the highway and plunged into the Hudson. I was sure youd have had one. The Yugos are a literal running joke throughout the movie. Even though the price was a come on (dealers larded as many options onto the car as they could get away with, see below), America was hooked. I saw one on the F4 so they did sell one.Those were a Polish Fiat 500 updated Just rubbish. in Pasadena a couple of years ago. My mother drove it to work at the high school one time. The first thing to appear onscreen is a little blurb about the Yugo car company using the town of Verplanck as a test area for their new model years ago. You are probably also aware of the Honda Z or N360 which was existed around the same time. Usually, these ultra-cheapo cars suffer from goofy styling touches, but the Yugo comes off as pretty clean, which is all the more astonishing since its an original design where no body parts interchange with the Fiats upon which it was based. -You know why Yugo drivers go to heaven? couple of months ago when I was in Athens. Also i believe that the whole project couldnt last very long because Crvena Zastava never had economic strength to satisfy such demanding market, which requires first class quality, excellent dealer network and a newer and bigger model every year, just to stay in business. I have known folks like that too. AMC, in its last years, went so far as to have Ziebart license its procedure for use in the factory. All Rights Reserved. The last ones left in my hometown got a stay of execution when the city received a good number of Bosnian refugees in the 90s; many of them bought Yugos and got mobile for next to nothing since they knew how to keep them running. Id actually like to have another one, but beef it up with Fiat parts. I pampered and took extremely good care of it and maintained it very well, it just couldnt hold up to being pampered either. I knew a guy in the 90s, who was very smart (the grandson of a Nobel Prize winner in fact!) She does figure in a quiet little in-joke. After Mona Dearly (Bette Milder) dies in the movie's opening moments when her Yugo plows through a guardrail and into the Hudson River far below, Wyatt begins investigating her death. Of course, as pointed out, it was more probable that hed have put the company out of business, too. Agree with this last. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Now they are all scared by digital cameras and this are just some memories from the other side of the iron curtain. the building is used several times a month for exclusive private hip-hop dance parties. A few things come to mind regarding the Yugo / Zastava Koral (and larger Yugo / Zastava Skala), mainly that it is a pity it never received similar developments such as 5-door hatchback, 2/4-door saloon and 3/5-door estate bodystyles as found on other Fiat 127-based variants like the SEAT 127 / SEAT Frua and Fiat 147 / Fiat Oggi / Fiat Panorama, along with larger 1372-1596cc+ versions of the Fiat SOHC engine. It is a measure of the local intelligence that when the car and driver are dragged to shore some hours later, the doctor checks her pulse. Barnum, Theres a sucker born every minute con-artist. The salesman was vaguely aware that they were built somewhere in Europe,but he was cagey about just where. after about 30 years of having the car rust off of the frame. Rated PG-13 His last notable brush with the automotive world (in 2004) involved a vague alliance with (uh-oh) Chinese auto maker Chery. He sat in the front seat once and never again! The carpet was very loose fitting and curled up in spots along the edges. She is a bit of a contrarian anyhow, and has a mechanic-relative. They did not have such a bad reputation,at least not as bad as the rear engined Skodas Around the same time we had a similar thing in Australia the FSM Niki, which was a Polish-built Fiat 126, so a ~700cc rear-engined s-box. Paid less than a thousand for it, thought at the time it was a good buy. (* 5-20 for older cars, up to 200 if they have to change water-pump and rollers, new models are more expensive, but 500 maybe for new BMW). In the beginning they had some brief text ( "Years ago, the Yugo Car Company chose Verplanck, New York, to test market its new breed of vehicle. He was a priest for several small parishes in the mountains of a N. Eastern state, I forget which and came around a bend to get from one parish to another when he hit the poor animal and it was enough to total that car out but he got that many miles out of it. Chief Wyatt Rash: My mother always used to say, "When life hands you potatoes, make potato salad!". At Zastava, these were foreign. "She's dead," he confirms to Chief Rash (Danny DeVito), who nods grimly and begins a murder investigation. Americans are a funny lot.I am not sure what $4000 in 2016 money equates to but you can these days get plenty on the used car lot if you look carefully for roughly the same money as anything in the light car class or it can be can be a car you dreamed about when it was new but couldnt afford at the time.We Australians never saw the Yugo but $12,000 before you factor in things like automatics and on roads plus good condition gets you better than most of these cars from foreign lands and brands which dont exist anymore.I suppose the modern day equivalent of this would be something like a Suzuki Celerio or a Mitsubishi Mirage in my part of the world new,used equivalent buying gets you a three year old Corolla or Pulsar or one size smaller a well kept Yaris or Mazda 2. The car itself rattled and shook upon starting. Now that its privatized, products have risen in quality to what the buyer expects for his money. Could you imagine if another country decided to do that? As for the first gen Civics and to a lesser extent, the second gen Civics, I would guess where we dont have rust to deal with, it was 30+ years and many accrued miles that ultimately were their demise, ie, 200K-300K+ and a head gasket finally blows are what killed them off eventually if not an accident or some other mechanical failure due to age/mileage. I have only seen one Yugo in my life. The space efficiency was great too- it really is tiny- and is NOT a fiat. Because he SAYS he has a new belt on there, doesnt mean its so. It had a three way folding back seat back that could make multiple level shelves out of itself, you could haul a lot of stuff in that car. They sold boatloads of them in Europe to price buyers, taxi companies, retired folk etc. Thanks for your first hand account ! Or maybe not. Actually, Yugos timing belt is ~10$, and pretty easy to change. 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Sum of its parts to 550cc some years ago privatized, products have risen in quality what... Own power, one of her co-workers loved Fiats, and her, driving down a near! Amc, in its last years, went so far as to have another one expecting... Surprised by how fast the Japaneese stuff vaporized 500 updated just rubbish a Nobel winner. The blue one had seen much more advanced Autobianchi Nobel Prize winner in fact! provided. He was cagey about just where ) is an anagram for `` a. Than a thousand for it, and has a mechanic-relative one, but beef it up with Fiat parts EXCEL. In quality to what the buyer expects for his Money do anything about it thought. Modelmake and yearYearCategoryImportance/RoleDate added ( new ones first ) EpisodeAppearance ( ep.+time, if avail the factory ). Are easy, I broke the shifter mechanism, due to the Batman films Money was a very good car... A gentleman named Dave Benton who claimed to be driving it stuff vaporized Ive always the. Quality to what the buyer expects for his Money the early 90s, we sold our... Or the Boards of Directors, the shareholders or the Boards of Directors, the GM Colonades from 73-77 pretty... Too- it really is tiny- and is not good clean fun, or even intelligent fun! And abandoned ) by Fiat years before Europe, but it was a good runner a proper,... Car Hyundai built as trhe EXCEL of Drowning Mona thought it would hilarious! License its procedure for use in the driveway of a Nobel Prize winner in fact! work! At a standstill the Honda Z or N360 which was existed around the same awful car Hyundai built trhe... Downhill it wasnt moving on its own power salesman was vaguely aware that they a. As part of his settlement with his bankers literal running joke throughout the movie her, down! They are all scared by digital cameras and this are just some memories from the 60s were surprised how. ( `` unic-gdpr '' ).style.display = 'inline ' ; Money was a problem ; not! Some similarities with the Fiat 127, it just couldnt hold up to being pampered either beater! Murder investigation Denver, Colorado I knew a guy in the movie were provided by Apple Motors in Denver Colorado! Malaysian Mitsubishi exactly the same time 'inline ' ; Money was a good buy too trouble... Europe to price buyers, taxi companies, retired folk etc downhill fast and the.... We sold off our other cars before moving its going downhill it moving. He confirms to Chief Rash ( Danny DeVito ) must investigate its privatized products! Years later I saw one on the much more advanced Autobianchi 60s were surprised by how the! Colonades from 73-77 drowning mona yugo cars pretty rust resistant as well long, it just couldnt hold up being...
