The Vehicles That Raised Us

Pop culture illustration does something to me that actual film stills don’t. The abstraction—the deliberate reduction to shape and color and emblem—forces recognition, and recognition is memory, and memory is that hollow-chest feeling you get when you realize you spent your formative years worshipping objects that technically don’t exist. Israeli illustrator Ido Yehimovitz has been working through the greatest vehicles in film and TV history, drawing them into a visual encyclopedia of things I would have given anything to ride as a kid. The DeLorean. The A-Team van. KITT. All of them stripped down and rendered with the kind of clean certainty that makes them look more real than the props ever did.

The honest question the series keeps asking is how many you can place without help. I got through most of them before needing to cheat. I’m choosing to count that as a win.