Core77

I remember well the cars that dotted my childhood block: Plymouth Valiants, Dodge Dusters, Ford LTDs, and for those with a little scratch, Lincoln Continentals. My pops' fondness for quirky foreign cars made us neighborhood automotive pariahs; the Karmann-Ghia and later, Scirocco he parked out front did nothing to endear us to the Joneses, though it did give me an appreciation for foreign-designed objects.

One car that caught my youthful eye was a machine I'd never seen in person--the canary yellow Fiat 500 driven by Lupin the 3rd in Castle of Cagliostro.

The animated, adventurous international thief had driven a Mercedes in previous installments of the Lupin series, and an apocryphal story goes that filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki asked animator Otsuka Yasuo to swap out the Benz for the Fiat as the latter was reportedly easier to draw. Otsuka himself was no stranger to the 500--he'd owned one himself.

I didn't find out what the car was until years later, when I was an adult living in Japan. People knew the car the same way an American raised on TV could tell you the General Lee was a Dodge Charger. In any case, I bring all this up because WebExpedition18 has posted a lengthy photo retrospective on the evolution of the Fiat, from 1937 to today. Fans of the quirky car will find it well worth a gander, especially those of us raised on Lupin.