MOVIE makers have long since understood that there’s something dramatic about a motorcycle that a car simply can’t match. Whether it’s the fact that they’re able to pull off more audacious stunts or that they give full view of the human stars that are riding them, a bike has become a silver screen staple with their use in movies far outweighing their prevalence in real life.
The choice here is enormous. From Tom Cruise’s Top Gun Kawasaki GPz900R to the Yamaha XJ650 Turbo ridden by Sean Connery in Never Say Never Again or the various Triumphs and BMWs used in the ever-growing Mission Impossible franchise.
But which two-wheelers have carved out legends of their own? Here’s our top 10. As ever, feel free to disagree and add your own choices in the comments.
10: Akira bike
Shotaro Kaneda’s bike is a focal point of the enormously popular Akira manga series and its spin-off movie, so makes the list despite being completely fictional. We never discover its brand, and quite how it even works is something of a mystery – although various fans have managed to create real-world approximations of the thing.
9: Batpod
Another fictional machine, but this time real, working creation; the Batpod appeared in The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. Created by master special effects coordinator Chris Corbould and his team in the UK, the dramatic-looking creation was apparently such a pig to ride that only stunt rider Jean Pierre Goy could handle it. Despite its dramatic looks, it was powered by a Honda single. While it was claimed to use a 750cc motor in its auction listing when the prop came up for sale in 2016, the pictures showed something that looked suspiciously like a CRF450 motocross motor tucked into the Batpod’s massive frame.
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8: Tron Lightcycles
If you’re of the age that saw Tron when it first came out in 1982, it’s hard to comprehend quite how far computer-generated graphics have come since then. The Lightcycle scene is the film’s defining moment, even though the blob-like bikes don’t actually behave anything like real motorcycles, achieving full-speed 90-degree turns without even leaning (although, weirdly, they do lean later on when traveling more slowly...) Illogical, unattainable but legendary nonetheless.
7: Terminator 2 Harley-Davidson Fat Boy
Most of the bikes on this list are either purpose-made for their film roles or heavily modified to suit them. But the Harley Fat Boy made famous in 1991’s Terminator 2 was a bog-standard machine. It’s really just one moment that made the bike famous – the leap from a concrete pier into the Los Angeles River aqueduct. There was movie trickery involved in the actual stunt – wires supported most of the bike’s weight and were painted out of the scene afterwards – but even so it remains a legendary motorcycle moment. The rider was actually Peter Kent, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s regular stunt-double (he also stood in for Arnie in the original Terminator, Commando, Predator, Total Recall, True Lies, The Running Man and a host of other movies).
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6: World’s Fastest Indian
Most of the bikes here famous purely from their movie roles, but Burt Munro’s World’s Fastest Indian merited a film all of its own. The story of Munro’s ingenuity and dedication to making his 1920 Indian into a record breaker is astounding in itself, and the bike’s appearance adds to its star quality.
As is so common with race bikes – continually updated and revised during their lives – there’s some confusion over what happened to the ‘original’ bike. American collector Tom Hensley arguably has the strongest claim, since his bike has the original chassis and one of the original bodies at the very least. Another bike, in Munro’s hometown of Invercargill, New Zealand, also surely features plenty of original parts. And of course two exact replicas were also built for the 2005 Anthony Hopkins movie of the same name.
5: Silver Dream Racer
Yes, Silver Dream Racer is cringe-worthy in parts and has a ridiculously unlikely storyline, but the David Essex vehicle remains a cult favourite bike movie. But what of the bike itself? Built by Barton around one of its two-stroke engines – which saw more success in sidecar racing than on two wheels – the movie bike was actually allowed to enter the 1979 British GP, reputedly with a 750 engine rather than a 500, to ensure some proper race footage could be filmed.
Roger Marshall had the task of riding it. As for the actual bike, it’s another machine that’s shrouded in mystery. There’s one out there with at least some real parts on it, but folklore has it that Barton sold the bike, along with its stock of engines and rights to the engine design, to Erik Buell, who supposedly used it as the basis of the Buell RW750.
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4: The Wild One Triumph Thunderbird
The Triumph Thunderbird 6T ridden by Marlon Brando (or his stunt double, in most instances) in The Wild One back in 1953 arguably set in stone an image of motorcycling that remains fixed in many people’s heads until this day. Most of them haven’t even seen the movie, but that photo of Brando posing next to the bike, in full Village People costume, is perhaps the most famous bike photo ever taken. The bike itself was nothing special, and is said to have been destroyed after filming.
3: Billy Bike
Like The Wild One, Easy Rider defines motorcycling in the minds of many. It might be a million miles from the reality of bike ownership, but the iconic counterculture film is surely the most famous motorcycle movie ever made. So its two-wheeled stars are inevitably among the most recognisable two-wheelers built. The so-called ‘Billy Bike’ – it has no actual name, but was ridden by Dennis Hopper’s character, Billy – was a hardtail Harley Hydra-Glide, an ex-police bike that was bought and modified for the movie by Cliff Vaughs and Ben Hardy. Although two were made for the film, both were stolen just before filming was completed, never to be seen again.
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2: The Great Escape Triumph Trophy
It’s one of the oddities of movie making that while filmmakers will spend millions making sure they get tiny details right in other areas, as soon as a motorcycle is involved they seem to say “close enough” and be done with it. Whether it’s the ‘1950s’ Harley – complete with modern disc brakes – in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the ‘Ducati Hypermotard’ (actually an Aprilia SXV450 in Ducati bodywork) in Knight and Day or the Montesa Cota 4RT trials bike used in both The Quantum of Solace and The Bourne Ultimatum, each time dressed up as an unidentified commuter bike, audiences just aren’t expected to pick up the flawed bike choices on the silver screen.
And The Great Escape is among the most blatant; a 1961 Triumph Trophy TR6 simply doesn’t look like a 1940s German military BMW R75, however much green paint you apply. But while it’s a motorcycle casting mess, the simple fact is that the combination of Steve McQueen, a 60s Triumph and that jump scene makes it among the most famous bikes ever built. These days the bike, which went to a farmer who used it to herd cows after the film was finished, has been restored to its movie condition and belongs to collector Dick Shepherd.
1: Captain America
It might have shared equal billing with the Billy Bike, but Peter Fonda’s Captain America chopper is without doubt the more famous Easy Rider creation. Like the Billy Bike, it’s based on a 1952 Harley Hydra-Glide police bike, heavily modified by Cliff Vaughs and Ben Hardy, but its stars-and-stripes paint makes it far more iconic. Of the two made for the movie, one was stolen along with both Billy Bikes just as filming wrapped. The other had already been wrecked and burnt as part of the movie’s final scene. Its remains went to actor Dan Haggerty, who’d helped with and appeared in Easy Rider. He rebuilt it and held on to it for decades, but now at least two machines lay claim to being that bike, with lawyers seeming to be the only winners from the dispute. Not surprising, really, given that it’s surely one of the most valuable pieces of two-wheeled memorabilia in the world.
