this must have done a lot of wheelies

https://www.facebook.com/groups/stiffspeed/permalink/1715367441943198/

Barris and a dune buggy called the Groovy Ocelot, on a music tv show called Groovy, probably capitalizing on the Beach movies with Annette in 64 and 65

One of the prime 1960s music tv shows was Groovy, introduced by host,

https://books.google.com/books?id=ytPXCnLmIycC&pg=PA85&lpg=PA85&dq=sand+chariots+ocelot&source=bl&ots=WFzSqV9meJ&sig=ACfU3U1WAReFmTHZyPCWYIAMf49C1lNvAQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi54f3qg4bhAhUSK30KHebQDxUQ6AEwB3oECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

Former Meyers Manx distributor turned-buggy manufacturer Marion Ruggles produced the Ocelot buggy through his Sand Chariots operation in Fullerton, from 1967 to 1970

They were named a variety of things... the Ocelot SS, the Ocelot II, and the Vaquero

It seems to me that the name Ocelot was a play on the cat name Manx that Bruce Meyer made iconic

http://www.dunebuggyarchives.com/registry/Ocelot
http://beachwheels.blogspot.com/2011/01/sand-chariots-of-california-ocelot-ss.html

For some reason, VW is just now rolling out a dune buggy, like the Meyers Manx, only electric. I guess Martha's Vineyard must have run out of new and interesting cars to impress each other with

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/pictures/volkswagen-i-d-buggy-electric-dune-geneva-2019/3/
via http://www.joesherlock.com/blog.html

Stack of happy times to come

https://www.facebook.com/groups/stiffspeed/permalink/1664479503698659/

Glamis 2017-2018

Hawaiian hotel tourist buggy... 1960

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1875670192532147&set=gm.1625775110902432&type=3&permPage=1&ifg=1

appears to be a Sand Chariots Ocelot

You've known that Jimi Hendrix died at 27, by choking on his own vomit, but did you know it was murder? His manager, ex MI6 agent, killed him for a 2 million dollar life insurance policy, and to prevent being sent to jail for embezzlement

When designer Don Haskin and business partner Max Becker unveiled their new buggy it was already cloned by Marion Ruggles as the Ocelot who got his copy in the same magazine issue (Hot VW's and Dune Buggies-August 69') and took credit for the design. 

This made designer Don Haskin so mad he took the bodies off the market and started a rental car company in resort areas such as Hawaii, Florida, Jamaica and Puerto Rico becoming the 7th. largest carmaker in the U.S. with over 500 turn-key cars produced in 1969.

The buggies were a part of the Hawaiian scene in 69 thru early seventies. 

50 customized Bushwhacker dune buggies, painted light blue and gold with big rainbow stickers on the top and sides were built for the Hilton Hotels and were used in the movie "Rainbow Bridge"

The Bushwhacker buggies were used by the Hilton hotel group as a fun rental car for hotel guests in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Miami. Jimi Hendrix cruises in a Bushwhacker Buggy in his movie "Rainbow Bridge".

Mike Jeffery, the manager for Jimi Hendrix and the Experience, toured them relentlessly after their apotheosis at Monterey Pop in ’67. By ‘69, the guitarist was earning $100,000 per gig, but was too exhausted and drugged out to realize that he was virtually broke while Jeffery was a multi-millionaire with off-shore numbered bank accounts.

At last, burnt out on touring, Jimi told his manager he was disbanding the Experience. No sooner did he reveal his intention than he was busted for heroin possession in Toronto.

He came to suspect that Jeffery, desperate that he might lose his cash cow, had engineered the bust so he, Jimi, would be forced to keep the Experience alive to foot his legal expenses.

Four months later, just after Woodstock, Hendrix was kidnapped at gunpoint, held hostage for several days, then ‘rescued’ in a dramatic shoot-out at his Woodstock compound.

 Soon he came to suspect that his manager was behind this intimidation too.

Still refusing to surrender to Jeffery and revive his golden goose, the Experience, Jimi formed the Band of Gypsys. At their premiere Madison Square Garden gig in January of 1970, Jimi collapsed on stage after only a few songs.

Buddy Miles insisted he’d seen Jeffery slip him two tabs of bad acid. ‘He didn’t want Jimi playing in an all black band,’ the Gypsys’ drummer declared. ‘One of the biggest reasons why Jimi is dead is because of that guy.’

By this time, terrified of Jeffery, the star was in secret negotiations with Miles Davis’s manager, Alan Douglas. After his Isle of Wright performance, Jimi lay low in London trying to avoid Jeffery who had followed him there. Meanwhile, he finalized a new management deal with Douglas.

On the morning of September 17, Douglas phoned Hendrix’s New York lawyers, informing them that he would be relieving Jeffery of his management duties. Meaning, not only would Jeffery lose his cash cow, his nemesis Douglas would, in taking over the books, discover his embezzlement and mismanagement over the years. Meaning the end of Jeffery’s career, if not imprisonment.

The next morning an ambulance, called by an unidentified party, screamed to the Samarkand Hotel where Hendrix was staying with his girlfriend, Monika Danneman. The paramedics found the door open, the flat abandoned, and a body on the bed covered in vomit.

Dr. John Bannister, the physician on duty at St Mary Abbot’s hospital when the ambulance arrived, later testified: ‘Jimi Hendrix had been dead for some time… Red wine was coming out of his nose and out of his mouth. It was horrific.’ He described how he tried to clear the singer’s windpipe with an 18-inch metal sucker, but finally gave up due to the inexhaustible volume of liquid.

‘Someone apparently poured red wine down Jimi’s throat to intentionally cause asphyxiation after first causing barbiturate intoxication,’ Dr. Bannister concluded. ‘Without the ability to cough he was easily drowned.’

Waterboarding and Forced Ingestion were commonly used by MI6 and other intelligence agents during the Cold War. It was a preferred interrogation or assassination technique since it left no marks on the body.

Almost no alcohol was found in Hendrix’s blood. Moreover, friends stated that he didn’t drink red wine.

In his 2009 title, ‘Rock Roadie,’ James Wright wrote that Jeffrey, his employer, confessed to the murder in 1971. ‘That son of a bitch was going to leave me,’ the manager said. ‘If I lost him, I’d lose everything.’

Instead, he gained a fortune: his management contract was renewed by default, he reaped the immense profits of posthumous record sales, and he collected on a $2 million dollar insurance policy which he had taken out on the star.

Michael Jeffery disappeared during a mysterious plane crash over France in 1973. His remains were never found. He was due in London court the very next day to defend himself in several huge lawsuits relating to his embezzlement, money laundering, and fraud.

https://selvedgeyard.com/2018/11/27/jimi-hendrix-hawaiian-haze-dune-buggy-ride-over-the-rainbow-bridge-to-the-afterlife/

During the morning of 18th September, she finds him unresponsive in her apartment at the Samarkand Hotel, Notting Hill. She calls for an ambulance at 11:18 a.m. and he is taken to St Marys Abbot’s Hospital where an attempt is made to resuscitate him. He is pronounced dead at 12:45 p.m. The post-mortem concludes that Hendrix choked on his own vomit and died of asphyxia while intoxicated with barbiturates. At the subsequent inquest, the coroner, finding no evidence of suicide and lacking sufficient evidence of the circumstances, records an open verdict. Dannemann stated that Hendrix had taken nine of her prescribed sleeping tablets, 18 times the recommended dosage.

http://www.readysteadygone.co.uk/who-killed-jimi-hendrix/
http://www.readysteadygone.co.uk/70-2/
http://www.vw-buggy.at/lexicon/manufacturer/60
https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/9xx22a/hendrix_and_friend_in_a_dune_buggy_late_60s/
http://www.dunebuggyarchives.com/BushwackerSS

Seems that Texas may want to outlaw home built dune buggies, sand rails, etc. Probably at the request of ATV companies

the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles’ recent refusal to offer titles and registration for their vehicles has resulted in outrage

In 2014, the Texas DMV quietly began to revoke titles for the vehicles, citing Texas Administrative Rule 217.3, which explicitly made any vehicle “designed or determined by the department to be a dune buggy” ineligible for title “regardless of the vehicle’s previous title and/or registration.”

When asked, however, Texas DMV officials have admitted that the state does not define what a dune buggy is.

Kit cars built as hobbies, designed to look like popular classic cars, and generally driven only to attend car shows and meetups of local enthusiasts, are now being denied title and registration by the agency.

“This is a classic example of the heavy hand of government getting into people’s lives for no legitimate reason,” said Faron Smith before the event. Smith, who runs the Assembled Vehicle Coalition of Texas, organized the rally in order to educate Texans on the quiet others have faced. “These vehicles have been legal in Texas for many, many years and have are fully inspected by certified state inspectors as Texas law prescribes.”

“For the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles to simply wake up one day and decide to ban vehicles with no legitimate reason is un-American and anti-Texan in my opinion,” he continued.

https://empowertexans.com/state/assembled-car-enthusiasts-rally-against-dmv-rules/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/SavetheTexasDuneBuggy/ 

expensive way to pull out the shrubs

power slide around a parking lot race track... in a dune buggy? That's more versatile than I considered buggys to be

http://beachwheels.blogspot.com/

one of 'The Thomas Crown Affair' dune buggy gets a restoration

After filming was complete, the red Manx was shipped to California and stored at United Artists, the production company behind the film. “Movie cars” weren’t so much of a thing back then and, as with the Mustang, it wasn’t considered to be much more than an old prop.

It did catch the eye of one enthusiast in Hawaii named Jimmy Pflueger. He’s famous himself for opening the first Honda car dealership in the United States, but spent the last years of his life dealing with the legal aftermath of a controversial dam collapse on a property he owned that resulted in seven fatalities. He died last year at age 91.

Pfleuger saw the movie and liked the car so much that he called the company, made an offer, and the next thing he knew it was on a PanAm flight to Hawaii, still full of salt and sand from Crane Beach. But he didn’t buy it to put into a museum.

Instead, he sent it to his mechanic, Lance Richards, and asked him to prep it for some dirt track racing. And what Richards did to it might give a preservationist a heart attack.

The VW Beetle-based buggy had been customized for the film by Con-Ferr Manufacturing, an off-road accessories company in Burbank that installed a Chevy Corvair flat-six, added chrome racks and bumpers, and gave it a snazzy Naugahyde-upholstered interior that was fitting of the swinging sixties.

Richards stripped out the fancy trim to lighten it up, took off the body, sandblasted the chassis and swapped in a VW 2180 racing motor. Then he took it racing.

Eventually, it was traded for a 1966 Mini Cooper S and a shotgun. And that’s where the new owner comes in.

He and a friend had known about “The Red Car” since they were kids, and dreamed of buying it one day. So when an opportunity to do that presented itself, he jumped at the chance in the mid-1990s, and left it in storage until last year, when the approaching anniversary of the film inspired him to finally get it back to its on screen glory.

http://www.foxnews.com/auto/2018/06/22/exclusive-missing-dune-buggy-from-steve-mcqueens-thomas-crown-affair-reappears-as-it-undergoes-restoration.html

Since another Meyers Manx from the Thomas Crown Affair was at the 2014 Art Center College car show...

http://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-thomas-crown-affair-manx.html

... I'm not sure what is the real story. We all know more than one car is used in a movie, so, maybe both are legit, however, Road and Track verifies that this was the TCA Manx https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a8948/2014-art-center-car-classic/



above, crap music but high res scenes from the Thomas Crown Affair dune buggy scenes.

Below, Steve talking about the Manx, but crap resolution

some photos from Automobile Magazine's coverage of the Mooneyes show in Yokohama

full gallery of this car at:
http://www.speedhunters.com/2017/12/hot-rodding-a-classic-kei-car/

1962 Mazda Carol. Originally 'powered' by a 358cc four banger, the Carol has been widened and had an S&S V-twin transplant. A pair of extra vents have been added to the top of the rear guards for extra cooling. There are Brembo brakes all round and it rides on a set of Colorado Custom billet rims.

http://www.automobilemag.com/news/super-unicorn-dragon-fantastic-double-gallery-mooneyes-socal-japan/
https://www.whichcar.com.au/events/show-n-shine/mooneyes-yokohama-rod-and-custom-show-2018

Chuck Connors looking very similar to Steve McQueen's dune jump with a woman in the passenger seat holding on for life

https://www.facebook.com/groups/stiffspeed/permalink/1415948051885140/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/674239962722623/admins/

It's a slightly different dune buggy in the opening sequence of Cowboy In Africa (which I've never heard of before) and the passenger is the supporting actor

Above from a bad copy but I have to thank Steve for knowing this even existed at ALL!
Below from the video I linked to AFTER going through and getting all those screen grabs.

trying to cash in on Speedbuggy

Mid Engined "Autocross" car?

Thanks Steve!

a bus I've never seen or heard of before which hauled along a dune buggy I haven't heard of either... 1962 Streamline Travel Car and Fiber Jet Cobra

I bet this would be a huge traction advantage

https://www.facebook.com/groups/6wheel/permalink/1366099573496462/