Tag: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Delicious Clicks

When my wife and I completed a partial remodel of our house last year, we replaced the rather ordinary-looking front door with a solid-core faux mahogany beauty, highlighted with a stylish centered rain glass cutout.  This single architectural element transformed our entry into a much more inviting space.  But after many months of opening our new door, I’ve come to realize it’s not just the look I enjoy so much.  It’s the sound.  A door of this caliber comes with a well-machined, weighty set of hinges and lockset.  Close the door and you’ll hear the latch and catch nestle comfortably and perfectly together.  It’s one of the most pleasing sounds I’ve ever heard.  I call it a delicious click.

Our newish front door

Delicious clicks.  Maybe you already know what I’m talking about.  You hear a rich, deep sound and you immediately think “high quality” or “high dollar” or just “n-i-c-e…”.  You hear this kind of a click in someone’s house and you think, “whoa, these people have it made”.  If you haven’t experienced this brand of audible, here’s an idea.  Your local bank may have a walk-in safe, one of those with the big spinner handle front and center on the door.  Maybe you can hang around until the time they secure the safe.  They’ll push that massive steel door closed on silent hinges.  They’ll spin the handle until it catches, and then secure the deadbolt with a secondary lever.

That’s when you’ll hear it.  A delicious click.

I’d love to trademark my little sound phrase but I must give credit where credit is due, so I summon James Bond.  Rather, James Bond’s creator, the author Ian Fleming.  After From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, and all of the other Bond adventures, Fleming wrote a wonderful, timeless children’s story called Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1964).  For those not familiar (and shame on you), Chitty is about a nutty inventor living in a windmill with his family, the nearby candy company whose owner’s daughter is “Truly Scrumptious“, a mysterious castle in a land called Vulgaria, and the magical flying car that brings it all together.

Note the license plate

Perfect for this post, “chitty chitty bang bang” is also the sound of the flying car’s engine when it’s in gear.  There’s a moment in the movie where you hear the four-part tempo and you think, “perfect words to describe it!”  But more to my point today, it’s the car’s doors that are even more pleasing.  Even without a copy of the book in my hands, I still remember the author’s description as Chitty’s doors came to a close.  Delicious clicks.

Mercedes just came out with its “largest and most luxurious” electric car, the EQS.  It’s the battery-powered equivalent of the popular S-class sedan.  It has an aerodynamically sloping hood to make speeds above 100 mph (!) smoother.  The EQS can travel 480 miles on a single charge.  And the purchase will set you back over $100K.

Ferrari’s 296 GTB

Ferrari just came out with a new “supercar” with 818 horsepower and a V6 engine.  The “296 GTB” is also a plug-in hybrid.  It’s not Ferrari’s fastest car but it sure looks like fun to drive.  If you have the means, the 296 GTB will set you back the equivalent of three Mercedes EQS’s.

I can’t afford either of these cars; not even close.  But I can guarantee one thing.  Whether you go with the Mercedes or the Ferrari, your money will get you meticulously crafted doors on your car.  With delicious clicks.

Only $900 on Amazon!

Recently one of my liquid soap bottles was down to its last few drops.  When I pressed down for more the nozzle made a horrible, empty, nasally kind of plea for more soap.  What an awful sound.  Not exactly “toot sweet”.

On that note, I think I’ll close my front door again.

Some content sourced from IMDb.com.

Land of Flying Cars

My wife and I live in a rural area of Colorado known as the Black Forest.  The high density of Ponderosa Pines in our small geography gives us our name.  Remarkably, there’s only one other notable place on the planet named “Black Forest”: the region near Bavaria in southwest Germany.  As it turns out, I have personal ties to both places, though I’ve never been to the south of Germany.  Follow along as I connect the Forests.

Fill in the blank, “Best Childhood Movie: ________”.  Most of you would respond with an offering from Disney.  Including “Snow White…”, “Mary Poppins”, and “The Little Mermaid”, you’ve already covered sixty years of film-making, with countless other Disney classics in between.  I don’t think I missed a single Disney growing up in the sixties and seventies, yet – go figure – my favorite childhood movie doesn’t come from the Mouse.  It doesn’t even come from my home country.  My childhood choice?  The UK’s “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”, based on the 1964 novel by Ian Fleming.

“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” – the captivating musical about the inventor and his kids who lived in a windmill cottage; about those wonderful-though-not-always-perfect inventions (my favorite: the eggs-toast-sausage breakfast machine); about the candy-maker and the toy-maker and the captivating castle world of Vulgaria; and most importantly about the magical flying motorcar itself – created figments of my imagination like no other movie.  The lyrics to the title song (“…Bang Bang Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, our fine four-fendered friend…”) were burned into my brain.  Someday I vowed to visit the lands of Caractacus Potts and Baron Bomburst.

     

As it turns out, the Potts’ windmill cottage really does exist (and not on a movie set) – as the “Cobstone Windmill” in Buckinghamshire, England. The mansion where “Truly Scrumptious” lived is in the same area of the country.  And the Scrumptious Sweets Company was a working factory in Middlesex (today a steam-engine museum).  But it was the castle and village in Vulgaria I really wanted to see.  Not long after seeing the movie of course, I learned “Vulgaria” was a fictitious country.  Baron Bomburst didn’t actually lord over the land, nor did he ever keep all those children as slaves beneath his castle. But the castle and the village are based on actual places.  The village is Rothenburg ob der Tauber in Bavaria.  The castle is Castle Neuschwanstein, also in Bavaria.  And how ironic; both locations were inspirations for Disney as well: Rothenburg for the village in “Pinocchio”, and Neuschwanstein for the Cinderella castles in the theme parks.

To bring my journey full-circle, Rothenburg, Castle Neuschwanstein, and Bavaria sit in southwest Germany, adjacent to… the Black Forest.  Germany’s version of the Forest is a mountainous land of picturesque villages, castles, vineyards and spas.  This is the region that brought the world Black Forest Ham and “truly scrumptious” Black Forest Cake.  This is the land of glass-making and cuckoo clocks.  From the photos above, it looks every bit as charming as “Vulgaria”.

  

Colorado’s Black Forest barely amounts to a dot on Google Maps.  Within our pines, the “town” is a hodge-podge of nondescript businesses clustered around a couple of traffic signals, with nothing more alluring than a Subway, a post office, and a couple of coffee shops.  The terrain is fairly flat, with no windmill cottages or mountaintop castles or cuckoo clocks.  But it’s a great place to live, with its own unique charm.  And every now and then, when I’m deep in the pines, I’ll start humming that forever-familiar Chitty-Chitty tune, as I gaze up to the skies in search of a flying motorcar.