Thursday 10th July 2008
Dick Dean (73), American automobile designer and builder of custom cars, died. In 1964 George Barris asked Dean to run the famous Barris Kustom City. His work with Barris included many notable cars, including the Surf Woody (designed by Tom Daniel), the X-PAK 400 floating air fan car, and cars for television shows such as the Munster Koach and Dragula for The Munsters, and cars for Beverly Hillbillies and Mannix. He collaborated with Dean Jeffries in 1966 on several TV cars, including Black Beauty for The Green Hornet and the Monkeemobile for The Monkees. In the later 1960s, Dean built many dune buggies on shortened Volkswagen Beetle chassis with fiberglass Meyers Manx bodies. Capitalizing on this premise, in 1968-69 Dean created his own body for a shortened Volkswagen chassis, the Shalako.
