by Greg Ulrich

Do you get all excited and weak-kneed every time you see an MG in a movie? I do. Ever since I saw Love Story with Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw and that little black MGTC, I have been on the lookout for MGs in the movies. A couple weeks ago I was watching the made-for-TV movie, Curacao with George C Scott. Nine minutes into the movie, the main character is hand cranking a rather natty looking MGTC and driving around the island of Curacao. I added the film title to my list of MGs in the movies and told a couple of friends who happen to own TCs. While one friend was trying to locate the movie, he came up with an amazing website. In fifteen years of searching, I probably had a couple dozen titles of movies with MGs in the film. Suddenly, I was looking at a website with 720 movies with over 60 different MG models in those movies.

Wait, it gets even better. You click on the model of MG you are interested in, say “TD,” and photos of MGTDs from 39 different movies pop up as thumbnails with a photo of the TD taken from a scene in each film. A link also pops up showing thumbnails of all other vehicles shown in the film. Even tractors and heavy machinery are shown and identified in every film listed. You next click on the thumbnail and up pops a full page photo with comments about the car and the film. The comments also frequently have additional photos of the MG from other scenes in the film.

There’s more. Every thumbnail has a one to five star rating for the role the MG played in the film. A single star would be a background vehicle such as an MG in a parking lot, down the block from the main scene. Three stars might mean the vehicle was used in a chase scene. Five stars would mean the vehicle was used throughout the film. Someday we will probably be able to click on the thumbnail and actually watch the movie but not yet.

Be warned. This site can be addictive. You can spend hours looking at the 720 thumbnails of MGs. You also can look up any of the 2000 other models of cars, trucks, and heavy equipment that appeared in thousands of films.

Oh! In my excitement I almost forgot to tell you the name of the website. It is the Internet Movie Cars Database at:         www.imcdb.org/vehicles_make-MG.html .

And remember, it’s always

Safety Fast!

Greg Ulrich