Photo via SixtySixKicks.
In the half century since the television series Route 66 went off the air, the road that the series took its title from has been officially decommissioned; many of the stars, guest stars, and even cameos from the series have gone on to successful film careers; and the American landscape – not to mention the Chevrolet Corvette – that featured so prominently in the series has drastically changed. Yet one production company believes it’s high time to bring the series back to the small screen. As Deadline Hollywood reported last week, Los Angeles-based Slingshot Global Media, which formed earlier this year, has begun development of a Route 66 re-boot with executive producer Kirk Hallam. Slingshot and Hallam are currently looking for writers for the show, and according to Slingshot CEO David Ellender, the remake of the series will follow much of the original’s format, with two young adventurers in a cool car traversing the country. “The premise is the same, but the United States is a different landscape than it was 50 years ago and we can’t wait to explore the multitude of diverse social issues confronting the nation today,” Ellender told Deadline Hollywood. 
Photo via Ohio66.
Originally developed by Herbert Leonard and Stirling Silliphant and aired over four seasons from 1960 through 1964, Route 66 followed two young men played by Martin Milner and George Maharis (the latter replaced in the second half of the show’s run by Glenn Corbett) as they drove throughout the country in a brand-new Corvette helping people they met along the way. Some fans of the show credit it for popularizing the Corvette, even though it was already on the market seven years when the show started. (For trivia buffs, the production of the original show used Corvettes of varying colors, from Horizon Blue for the first season to Fawn Beige for the second and Saddle Tan for the last two; each season used a Corvette from that model year, thanks to Chevrolet’s product placement agreement with the show.) Previous attempts to revive the show – including a 1993 television series that lasted four episodes and a late 2000s film to have been produced by Hallam that never materialized – didn’t meet with the same success as the original show. No projected airing date for the Route 66 remake has been announced. Article courtesy of Hemmings Daily, written by Daniel Strohl.
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