Robert Kirkman Wants You To Survive The Zombie Apocalypse… In A Hyundai
If there was any doubt left that the horror of the living dead had been fully absorbed into mainstream pop culture, we can go ahead and put it to rest: The horror of the zombie apocalypse is now being used to sell the Hyundai Elantra.
The dramatic improvement of your survival chances is the subject of a video starring Walking Dead co-creator Robert Kirkman, where the writer redesigns the Elantra into a mobile zombie-killing platform, and goes into his own relatively low chances for survival in the process. The car in question -- depicted above -- is actually being built and will be featured at next month's Comic-Con International in San Diego, but you can catch all of Kirkman's reasoning in the video after the cut!
I'm going to go ahead and admit that I initially found the video's claim that an Elantra would help you survive the hordes of the undead to be a little dubious, especially since we Evil Dead fans know full well that the proper zombie-battling car is a 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale. But considering that realism goes completely out the window as soon as corpses start getting up and devouring the brains of the living, it pretty much comes down to Kirkman's word. If the guy writing the comic says that Hyundai is the best way to survive, who are we to doubt him?
But as much as I like this as a truly bizarre bit of marketing, I've got to say that it doesn't really do a great job of highlighting any of the car's features. I mean, all we get about the car itself is that it has a sun roof (which is nice) and that it's apparently big enough to live in (if you don't ever feel the need to have a bathroom). The rest of it just revolves around tricking it out for maximum zombie-killing potential, and it seems to me that you could weld metal plates, kneecappers and a gigantic spiked grill to just about anything and get a similar result. The added weight would even throw off the Elantra's gas mileage!
Still, it's pretty fun, and I honestly hope that this leads to more commercials that imagine how various cars would fare in various improbable, completely imaginary situations. Forget about JD Power & Associates and five-star safety ratings, I want to know how Toyota Camry would fare in a battle against the goblins of Barad-Dûr. Is the Ford Focus the right choice when you're fleeing a Terminator? Is the lower price of the Kia Sorento worth it when it might actually be a Decepticon? People deserve to know.
Either way, it'll be fun to see the actual, real-life Zombie-Proofed Elantra when it shows up at San Diego next month. Especially if they let me drive it through the Walking Dead obstacle course they're setting up at Petco Park.
[via CBR, where they have the best possible screencap of Robert Kirkman]