This is it, folks: one of our most iconic cars in our collection, nay, possibly one of the most iconic cars known to man. This is what you've been waiting for! With bated breath, presumably, and as your esteemed tour guide I can safely say that you can breathe out now, for you all know this car: you've seen it in the classic Sixties television show, you've seen it in the movies, the remakes, the breakfast cereal. You've seen how it can transform into a giant armored ball, crushing every baddie in its path; you've seen how its machine guns can blow away all our supervillains into bits.

That's right: it's the Armadillomobile, the greatest comic book car ever, as driven by one of the greatest superheroes of all time, no less than Armadilloman—aka Bruce McClaine, a small-town boy from Smalltown, Texas, bitten by a radioactive armadillo and forced to take revenge on the deaths of his parents from a falling meteorite. Sorry: I'm a bit of a nerd, you can say, which is to say I enjoy partaking in popular entertainment that's now become so mainstream as to be our only source of cultural creativity. But many of you might not be familiar with how this car came to be, and let me tell you, it is a story as good as gold!

There are many "kustom kar kustomizers" in this world today, but none of them have had the breadth and scope and influence as Carlos Languidini. Carlos! No finer man there was. A genius with the pinstriping. His 1954 Mercury "Kommie Kustom" which resides in the Guggenheim was a masterpiece, with its bubble-top fenders, star-shaped wheels, and crude outlines of Senator Joseph McCarthy on the windshield, etched in gold flake. The custom car he built for the Trett MacKingsfield post-apocalyptic basketball movie "Gotta Shoot, Shoot Your Way To The Top!" remains today a classic, what with its laser spatulas mounted in the hub of every wheel, and a roof-mounted hammer that famously shoots exploding basketballs into mutant Battleroaches, many of them played by a young Al Pacino.

And so on.

The giant curling tail really could be cranked up to 65psi for real, authentic, baddie-smashing action, which proved to be both disastrous and serendipitous on the Santa Monica Freeway.

Languidini was commissioned by [Famous Movie Studio Who Will Threaten To Sue Us If We Mention Them Here] to bring Armadilloman Chadwick Nardf's most famous creation, and his car, to life. Little did he know, however, that long-forgotten karbuilder Danny Girolamo had originally been commissioned by Famous Movie Studio for a design of his own, one that was able to match Nardf's crude pen-and-ink drawings almost exactly. Girolamo spent weeks in his North Hollywood studio, devising intricate hydraulic and pneumatic systems to get every detail just right. The 10-foot flipper arms, for instance. And the giant curling tail that really could be cranked up to 65psi for real, authentic, baddie-smashing action, which proved to be both disastrous and serendipitous on the Santa Monica Freeway when Girolamo mistook the button for a cigarette lighter and inadvertently stopped an in-progress police chase.

Languidini was undeterred by the other man's progress and his far more capable talent. Using his many connections he gained from the House Un-American Activities Committee, he scored a deal with East German carmaker Zoetrope to buy their Futuro! concept car for the princely sum of a dollar. The concept car was painted a deep, luscious pearlescent red, polished to a mirror finish,with five-foot-long triple fins running the length of the car. Languidini cut these down with a Sawzall—you can see the rough outlines of these cuts here, and here—before applying thirteen coats of battleship grey with a brush. The dimples that form Armadilloman's "scales?" Those were created with Languidini's secret technique: a hammer.

It was truly a visionary's touch that created this great grey lump.

Most of the remaining special effects were created in post. But wait! There's one trick that actually made it! In the made-for-TV movie, there's a famous shot of Armadilloman gut-kicking a few bad guys with his Laser Boots, before jumping off the 6th Street Bridge as the Armadillomobile envelopes him in soft, squishy foam? That really happened. See these fireman's hoses from the base of the pillbox-shaped windshield: they really sprayed asbestos lining onto actor Shemp Croydon, who played Armadilloman for eight seasons before he was arrested for grotesque public indecency, of which the specifics are still a state secret.

The Karl Marx hood ornament was an in-joke added to later episodes to sneak past the censors. Who says they don't have fun on television anymore?