By “car casting” I mean, how well does a vehicle shown on screen fit the character it’s supposed to belong to. So good car casting makes you go “That’s exactly the sort of car this character would drive”. Bad car casting makes you go “There’s now way in hell that character would actually drive that”.
I think the best I’ve seen in recent years is Walter White’s Pontiac Aztek in Breaking Bad. They probably picked that car for him to make him to make him seem like kind of a loser, but it also fits his personality really well. From the reviews I’ve seen, if you ignore the Aztek’s styling it was actually a fairly good vehicle with a lot of innovative features. And Walt seems like the kind of guy who cares more about function over form (At least before he went full Heisenberg). And he probably got a good deal on it; I imagine Pontiac dealers had to practically give them away. Walt probably considered the Aztek a smart buy.
Also, Gus Fring’s Volvo. It’s a nice car, a car a successful businessman would plausibly drive. But it’s not too nice, not a car that would attract much attention. Exactly his M.O.
As for the worst, in Ozark, in the first episode Marty has to sell his car to pay back the cartel. Then an episode or two later when they buy their house in the Ozarks and agree to let Buddy continue living in it as their tenant until he dies, Marty makes a comment along the lines of “Buddy will let us borrow his car.” So I assume the old Datsun station wagon Marty drives around in is supposed to be Buddy’s car. Except it’s established early on that Buddy is from Detroit, and later on we find out he was a negotiator for the UAW when he was younger. There is absolutely no way Buddy would ever own a Japanese car.
Also, most instances where a character has a car solely for product placement. In the later season’s of Monk Natalie seemed to have a brand new car every season, obviously because of product placement deals. As a single mom who’s constantly complaining about how much Monk underpays her, it’s highly unlikely she’d be driving such new cars.
This probably isn’t exactly what you’re thinking of, but I thought that choosing the new-at-the-time Chevy Camaro as the new make for the Bumblebee character in the Transformers franchise was pretty solid. It was corporate product placement and in no way organic, but it still worked pretty well. And there’s no way that the whole Shia-Megan Fox meet-cute works with a shoddy old (or new, ugh) VW Beetle.
Michael Scott’s Chrysler Sebring Convertible. Perfect for him. You could see him just eating up some salesman’s pitch about how chicks dig convertibles and being clueless about it’s crappy reputation.
Dwight’s Firebird. In his mind the essence of cool for his generation. He wanted to impress other nerds with it.
I agree, Sharona’s car in seasons 1-2 fit pretty well. A safe, practical, Volvo wagon, but an old one. Probably the best she could afford. And Monk probably liked their reputation for safety, too.
I though Michael Scott had a PT Cruiser. But maybe he had more than one car throughout the series. But the same thing applies – he probably though the PT Cruiser was cool and was completely oblivious to its dorky reputation.
Sam and Dean Winchester driving their Dad’s Impala that they had known since childhood was a great choice. Brought the whole family story together. It started as a show about brothers and their Dad and it made sense they drove that car.
Tony Soprano’s Suburban is so iconic, it’s practically a character itself. Everything about it fits him perfectly. It’s large and bulky, it is nondescript and not flashy, and its name even reflects the fact that Tony is fundamentally a suburban guy, keeping his home life compartmentalized from “the thing” and retreating back into the safety of the suburbs during the title credits at the beginning of every episode. They couldn’t have picked a more fitting vehicle for him in a million years. As soon as he switches to an Escalade in the middle of Season 5, it’s destroyed in a crash, almost as if to signal that he should have stuck with the Suburban.
The VW van that Kevin Costner drives across the country in Field of Dreams to pick up James Earl Jones in Boston and bring him back to Iowa, I think that’s a pretty good candidate. Although admittedly probably not a great candidate. Along the way they visit the Burt Lancaster “doc” character, and then later they pick up the hitchhiking younger “doc” character and bring him to play baseball on that field in Iowa.
I grew up road tripping in a VW van like that. I guess it’s one of my sentimental favorite car castings.
Bad, or at least curious car casting: Tom Cruise drives a 1963 Impala in A Few Good Men. His character just doesn’t seem like that kind of guy. I suppose it could have been his late father’s old car or something like that, but no explanation is ever given.
Do we ever know what cars the characters on The Big Bang Theory drove? I think we clearly saw Howard’s late season van, but what about Raj? Or Leonard for that matter?
If we don’t know, then the cars were very poorly cast.
IIRC, in most scenes where they’re driving you just see the characters through the windshield, so it’s difficult to tell what kind of car they’re in. I’m not sure they were even consistent between episodes. Although I vaguely remember Penny’s car looking like a VW Cabriolet, which is not a terrible choice for her, albeit a little cliched.
ETA: And Sheldon of course didn’t drive, hence needing his “bus pants”.
