Potential spoilers for ! Filmmaker Sam Raimi has plenty of trademarks that appear in most or all of his movies. Wild camera movement, excessive Three Stooges references, a cameo by Bruce Campbell, and a surprise appearance by his 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88. Raimi’s most recent film, the hit Marvel Studios sequel Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness features all four of those things, including the car, which Raimi affectionately refers to as “The Classic.” You can find the car a little over halfway through the film when Doctor Strange and Christine Palmer enter an alternate Earth that has become largely destroyed due to an incursion, as they walk around The Classic can be seen floating in the air.
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The Classic has appeared in almost all of Raimi’s feature films including every Evil Dead movie, all three Spider-Man movies he directed, his 2009 movie Drag Me to Hell, and even in 2013’s OZ the Great and Powerful. “After about 25 Super 8 movies and Evil Dead, I realized it mas the only car that had ever been in my movies, and I just kept that going,” Raimi previously told Esquire. “It’s Uncle Ben’s car in the Spider-Man films. Unfortunately, it got car-jacked in the first one. He died for it. I feel terrible. Peter gets it back, though. It’s at his aunt’s house nom, rusting.” Even the TV series Ash vs Evil Dead used The Classic, they even produced a full BTS featurette about it.
“The Delta 88 is a 455 V8, a very powerful Detroit engine. Sam fell in love with that car and would not let it go,” Bob Tapert, Raimi’s frequent collaborator and Evil Dead producer said in the video. “When Sam went off to Michigan State University, where I met him, his father gave him the Delta 88. Sam and I drove back in that car from shooting Evil Dead in Tennessee to Michigan in January of 1980, and we’d been up about 72 hours and that car kind of saved our lives. We kept falling asleep driving. We would go off and the car would go (rumbling sound), and we’d go ‘ugh!’ and get back on the road.”
Tapert continued, “Through all of Sam’s movies we probably have gone through 100 Delta 88s, but we still have the classic, the original.” You can see it for yourself in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, now playing in theaters.
