Who will ever forget John Cusack’s character, Jackson Curtis, racing through Yellowstone National Park in a real fireball of a Winnebago?
otorhomes were made for the movies. If people like Roland Conklin and Raymond Frank hadn’t created and improved upon the concept of a self-sufficient home on wheels for outdoor enthusiasts, someone would have come up with the idea for movies.
Why? Because motorhomes are the perfect foil.
For starters, they are big enough to house a whole gang of people — and with most films, the more characters a movie has, the more opportunities to create comedic relief or, conversely, conflict. Then, too, motorhomes carry enough “armament” — in the form of onboard systems which, in movies, are prone to failure or misuse — to carry most movie scripts. Especially when dealing with, well, scatological references. You know, toilet humor.
For example, you might not remember much from the movie National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation — but you will always recall the image of Cousin Eddie Johnson (Randy Quaid), wearing an aviator hat and ratty bathrobe on a snow-covered street while he holds a sewer line and empties the blackwater holding tank into a neighborhood storm drain. Or, when “Howie and Jojo” — “Nice boys, but they’re a couple of pliers short of a tool chest” — helped Bob Monroe (Robin Williams) hook up to a dump station in RV, creating a poop geyser.
While we didn’t include the movie The Leisure Seeker in our list, we’d be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge the film and its stars: Donald Sutherland, Helen Mirren and a 1975 Winnebago Indian actually owned by Jeff Barth, president of the Classic Winnebago club.
By the way: Because we limited this to motorhomes that have appeared on the big screen — almost a misnomer in an era of 120-inch TVs when everything is on a big screen — it pretty much ruled out perhaps the most famous RV ever seen in a show, the 1986 Fleetwood Bounder used as the Walter White’s mobile methamphetamine laboratory in Breaking Bad. Ditto the 1973 Winnebago Chieftain used in the first two years of The Walking Dead.
And, because it wasn’t a motorhome, we also eliminated Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz and the infamous 1953 36-foot Redman New Moon trailer showcased in The Long, Long Trailer.
Sorry, but we had to draw the line somewhere.
Is this list complete? Probably not. And it’s also totally subjective. But we had to start somewhere — and, to our credit, many are now regarded as “cult classics.”
