George Barris obituary

George Barris, who has died aged 89, was a leading American figure in the world of exotic and sensational automobiles. The king of “kustom” cars, as he liked to call them, Barris had a gift for transforming a run-of-the-mill vehicle into a four-wheeled event, and his talents were eagerly sought by television and film studios, rock stars and movie icons.

An outstanding landmark in his long career was his creation of the Batmobile for the 1960s Batman television series, which starred Adam West as the caped crusader. “I saw the script and it said, ‘Bang’, ‘Pow’, ‘Boom’,” said Barris in a 2012 interview. “That’s exactly what I wanted the car to be able to do. I wanted it to be as big a character as the actors themselves.”

Barris went to work on a Lincoln Futura – a concept car from 1955 that had been exhibited at motor shows but never mass produced. In a mere 15 days he came up with the Batmobile, a sleek black-with-red-pinstripes craft with rakish fins and a fighter plane-style cockpit. The car became one of Batman’s most popular trademarks, along with Neal Hefti’s theme tune and the show’s camp and comic tone. In 2013 the Batmobile sold for $4.63m (£3m) at auction in Arizona.

By the time he built that car, Barris was already a customiser of great renown in California, and had been one of the subjects of the title essay in Tom Wolfe’s 1965 book The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (originally published as an article in Esquire in 1963). Wolfe described him as “a good example of a kid who grew up completely absorbed in this teenage world of cars, who pursued the pure flame and its forms with such devotion that he emerged an artist”.

Prior to Batman, Barris had made his mark in television by creating the Munster Koach for the satirical monsters-in-suburbia sitcom, The Munsters. The 18-ft (5.5-metre) hearse-like craft was assembled from the bodies of three Model T Fords with the engine from a Mustang GT. In 1968 Barris also got the call when the makers of The Beverly Hillbillies sitcom needed a hot rod, which he built by taking a 1921 Oldsmobile Roadster and adding a new engine, wheels, transmission and bodywork, completed by a Fire Red metal flake paint job. In the 80s Barris transformed a Pontiac Trans-Am into KITT, the artificially intelligent car driven by David Hasselhoff in Knight Rider.

Barris was born George Salapatas in Chicago to James and Fanicia (nee Barakaris), Greek immigrants who later changed the family name. In 1928 his mother died, and George and his older brother, Sam, were sent to live with an aunt and uncle in Roseville, California. The brothers worked part-time for a family-owned Greek restaurant. Rewarded for their efforts with the gift of a battered old Buick, they customised it, then sold it to buy a 1929 Model A Ford to refurbish, forming the Kustom Car Club for likeminded enthusiasts.

Having left San Juan high school in Citrus Heights, near Sacramento, George moved to Los Angeles and opened a custom shop in the nearby town of Bell, where his brother joined him after wartime service in the US navy. They relocated to a new venture in Compton, also in Los Angeles county, the Barris Brothers Custom Shop. George tried his hand at car-racing, but the rapidly expanding business soon took up all his time. In 1948 Robert E Petersen, publisher of Hot Rod magazine, staged the first hot rod show in Los Angeles, and the Barris brothers’ Buick was the only custom car included.

The brothers moved once again in Los Angeles county, to Lynwood, where they created the “Hirohata Merc”, a 1951 Mercury owned by a customer, Bob Hirohata, which they radically modified. The car caused a sensation in auto magazines and at car shows across the US. In 1957 Barris unveiled Ala Kart, a customised 1929 Model A Ford, which went on to win more than 200 trophies and regularly appeared in movies and magazine articles.

Sam quit the business in 1956, but George carried on in partnership with Shirley Nahas, whom he married in 1958. That same year Barris’s work began appearing in movies, when he provided cars for High School Confidential! He also put his vehicular stamp on films such as The Silencers (1966), Fireball 500 (1966), and Thunder Alley (1967), and devised the titular automobile for The Car (1977), a story of a satanic and apparently driverless Lincoln Continental (heavily customised, of course). He undertook numerous collaborations with big car manufacturers, working with Buick, Chrysler, Ford’s Custom Car Caravan and Lincoln-Mercury’s Caravan of Stars. His work was in demand among showbusiness stars, including Elvis Presley, Burt Reynolds, Sylvester Stallone and Liberace, for whom he converted a Volkswagen Beetle into a miniature Rolls-Royce.

He also built the Bobby Darin Dream Car, finished with “diamond-dust” paint, and for the 1965 movie Marriage on the Rocks he delivered a customised Ford Mustang for Frank Sinatra’s character, Dan Edwards. Meanwhile, Barris displayed great entrepreneurial flair by striking deals with plastic kit-makers such as Revell, who turned his cars into bestselling toys. He was frequently seen at motor shows wearing his trademark yellow jacket with Barris Kustom Industries emblazoned on the back.

Shirley died in 2001. He is survived by their daughter Joji, son Brett, and grandson Jared.