By Robby DeGraff
Do you ever just need a burst of sunny inspiration on a frigid, Tuesday in January? Fear not friends, the 1987 Isuzu Elf 150 has arrived, and it’s brought the entire universe with it. It’s been a hot minute since we’ve done a comical Hooniverse Classic Captions Contest post due to the website sitting in the IT hospital for an extensive redesign (cheers again, Jeff). Let’s pick it up again, literally with this late ’80s utilitarian gem.
Sadly the comments from our last Classic Captions Contest featuring Renault’s adorable, goofy ’96 Twingo didn’t carryover into the new Hooniverse.com unveiling, so we’ll start with a brief history lesson, specifically for the fourth generation Elf shown above. For sixty years now, the Elf has been the global godchild of Isuzu, built in nearly every corner of the world from Bogotá, Columbia and Pekan, Malaysia, to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and even Janesville, Wisconsin.
Millions of Elves have flooded the world’s streets in minibus, dump, and open-bed configurations, with single or double cabs. Power comes from a slew of small turbocharged four-cylinder diesel-engines, and the Elf could be ordered in 150, 250, and 350 models with Super or Wide body styles.
From 1984 until July of 1993, the fourth gen Elf continued to sell around the globe and stepped foot into the United States where it was sold as the GMC Forward, Isuzu L Series, and Chevrolet Tiltmaster. Since everything’s bigger in America, a colossal 8.4-liter diesel found its way under the hood of the Elf beginning in 1986 for a short period of time. Imagine a single cab, open-bed variant with that heavy-duty powertrain.
I stumbled across this rad shot of an ’87 Elf on my go-to, online bible for old-school OEM press car images, which I hope hope all of you bookmark…. and I have so many questions about it. Anyways, I’m very tempted to make this the new background on my Dell laptop.
What could it possibly be hauling?
Is this a highway leading away from Lando Calrissian’s Cloud City in Star Wars?
Why are there massive pictures of birds on the boxes plopped up in the Elf’s bed?
Maybe you can hypothesize with me, too.
Kamil Kaluski
Rise above it all when you go falcon hunting with your Isuzu Elf.
Incidentally because the diesel engines can cost a lot to rebuild if blown up prooprop, they often get repowered by, you guessed it, a SBC!
rattle-rattle CHIRP!-CHIRP! Freeeoww, boi-oi-oi-oing! Floobadoobadoop.
Froon.
I know I’ve seen some of that gibberish somewhere. Help a brother out! Maybe Hitchhiker’s Guide?
Ah, a fellow speaker of Genuine Cowboy Gibberish! Well spotted…
“Freeeoww” was said by either Ford Prefect or Zaphod Beeblebrox, somewhere in a Hitchiker’s book, after a close call. “Froon” is a variant of “Vroon” which I believe was uttered by a mattress after a dispiriting conversation with Marvin.
“Floobadoobadoop” is the superlative of “Ploobadoof”, the sound of Wonder Woman releasing her Amazon brassiere. (Usuallly pronounced singsong, to the tune of the Rockin’ Robin lyric, “Tweedleedleet”.)
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“South for the winter, north for the summer, south for the winter… I’m not complaining about the job security, I’m just saying these birds used to migrate all by themselves before they got all citified. Shadows used to make a lot more sense, too. I miss sensible shadows.”
“Whew, the engine had to work really hard to get out of that valley. Good thing that, unlike VW, Isuzu diesels don’t have any emission problems!”
or
Canaries in a coal mine? No, songbirds in the smog.
Space Truckin!
And so began the long drive to the white cliffs of Dover.
“There must be some kinda of way out of here”, said the Joker to the truck thief.
“No reason to get excited”, the thief he kindly spoke.
“Now excuse me while I kiss the sky!”
“Capistrano or Bust!”
“Said I wasn’t brave enough to drive over there and tell it to their faces? Just a blowhard over Skype? Yeah, I’ll show ’em. I’ll show ’em all! I’ll walk right into that building and give each and every one of those jerks the bird!”
Hiro was in for a big surprise when he got to Cloud City.
“Whaddya mean ‘Bird Box’ is only on Netflix? …then what did I just order on Prime?”
When transporting birds through an 80s themed alternative dimension, ‘elf and safety is important.