Larry Crowne Electric Scooter, Photo.

As you may have noticed around scooter blogs, it’s Larry Crowne mania. You may recall the 2SB post about the Lambretta outfitted by Route 66 Scooters with an electronic conversion kit from Soundspeed Scooters. The person behind that kit is also behind the Fido electric scooter concept also reported on earlier. Now we have photographic evidence of the machine in action. The photo shows the clearly un-two stroke drive train. For some continuity, they even throw in a kick start lever! While I haven’t seen the film yet, I’ll likely check it out while it’s in first run. In the mean time, can anyone chime in with a description of how this scooter plays a role in the film? Is it really passed off as a stink wheel with a sound effect? Or is it embraced for the Lithium Ion powered machine that it is?

(photo from Zimbio)

14 thoughts on “Larry Crowne Electric Scooter, Photo.”

  1. can anyone chime in with a description of how this scooter plays a role in the film? Is it really passed off as a stink wheel with a sound effect? Or is it embraced for the Lithium Ion powered machine that it is?

    Only Lammy I noticed was in the gas pumpin’ scene.
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  2. Same here. Larry’s noticing the price of his fillup is getting up there when the two scooters pull up. We see $3.73, then the scoots take off, their exhaust noise rather quiet, considering what we’re used to. Obviously added by Foley artists. The Lammy rider kicked it, too.

  3. If the gas scene scooter and the scooter pictured above (which is on the road w/Larry so it must be later in the movie) are the same bike, it was certainly implied (and foley-ed) that it was a gas scooter. IIRC, the gas pumping scene was a black Vespa and a black Lambretta with SX panels. I got the impression that the gas station bikes were Wllmer Valderrama and a friend, before Larry met them.

  4. Of course, that’s assuming that the photo above is actually from the movie, and not just a production still. But one would assume they shot the scooter stuff all within the same few days, including the gas station scene, just to keep the extras organized, and re-used the same few scooters throughout the movie.

  5. It was interesting that they went to the trouble of the conversion. I figured it was built for indoor sets or something. I thought there was a Vespa conversion as well. Maybe stuff that ended on the cutting room floor.

  6. I can’t think of any scooter footage that would have been shot on a soundstage, but who knows, it’s Hollywood, maybe the whole film was shot on a soundstage. In any case, the only scenes with fewer than a half-dozen scooters would have been the gas station (lammy + vespa), some with just the Riva, and maybe a few with the Velocifero and Vespa Rally. So if they were converting anything to electric, you’d think they’d have converted the scooters that appeared more often.

    I wonder if it really was converted specifically for the film. If it was, maybe it was at Hanks’ request, simply so he could keep it afterwards!

  7. I want to buy this to ride to rallies. If it’ll go that far.

    There was some scooter footage that was shot on a soundstage and chromakeyed, but it may have just been for t he end credits. Hanks tweeted a pic showing his Riva and the Velocifero in front of the screen.

  8. Um, if you were shooting on a soundstage to do chromakey work, it seems unlikely that the scooter would have to be running. ;)
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  9. Or maybe it was that they really wanted a Lambretta in the film but knew damn well that it would have been impossible to keep it running reliably enough to keep the shooting on budget.

  10. I just saw the movie. Pretty mediocre. But it hits way too close to home, on many levels. But I like Julia Roberts’ performance. Does Tom Hanks have hair plugs?

    Now I’m off to a scooter shop to watch Matty try to buy a Lambretta. It’s a day full of scooter torture.

  11. Oh, right the end credits! Wow. Actually the beginning and end credits were both TERRIBLE. The beginning was just uninspired and sloppily typeset, and the end was the too, but over 90s-looking chromekey collages and photoshop filters. You shouldn’t be seeing jpg artifacts on a major studio motion picture.

    Bb

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