Our featured Mopar of this week is a 1970 Dodge Super Bee in plum crazy purple from Johnny Lightning. Do you know why they call this the Super Bee?
The late sixties and the early seventies were a wild time when you still have the psychedelic influence in music, 'ots of bright colors, and in-your-face design; and it's obvious in the muscle cars of the era. We're looking at this '70 Super Bee and it's painted in this plum crazy purple with a white vinyl roof and white stripes at the back - it's about as in-your-face as you can get - characteristic of what was going on back then.
These cars back then had very specific branding. Cars of today have a name and style but at this point by 1970, especially the Mopars, they all had a kind of a story that went with them. The story on the Super Bee is that it came out after Plymouth Roadrunner but it shares the same platform and the Roadrunner was wildly successful. Again it's got its own persona - the Roadrunner cartoon character and all that jazz.
Dodge wanted their own version of the Roadrunner and so they looked at the Coronet platform and internally came up with a persona for the car. Therefore they designed the Super Bee name and logo, which is a bee with its goggles, helmet, and pipes with big tires and everything. That was inspired from an earlier design for the Dodge Scat Pack, and the Scat Pack started in 1968. It was kind of a branding for all the super hot Dodge muscle cars; they were grouped together and called the Scat Pack.
So it was the Charger, Challenger, Dart GTS and now the Super Bee joined the Scat Pack as well. And where this Scat Pack Bee came from was the stripe design, Dodge has put a tail stripe around the back of the car that become known as the Bumble Bee. So the Bumble Stripe morphed into the Scat Pack logo which morphed into the Super Bee logo itself - again, this cartoon character element was really prevalent.
The Scat Pack was really cool because back then it was a club you could join though your local Dodge dealer and you got a newsletter, a membership card, a sticker which you also got Dodge Direct Connection High Performance parts catalogue for free. The catalogue contained Scat Pack packages that involved putting certain parts together for sale to make your Scat Pack car go even faster.
Dodge claims the grill openings to be bee wings. The reason why it's called a Super Bee is because this is a B-body Dodge. And it's super...
Under the hood is where all the action happens, you got a 440 cubic inch V8 making 390 horsepower and it's being fed by the fabled Six Pack 3 two-barrel carburettors setup. Despite the 440 decals on the hood scoops, it seems that Johnny Lightning stuffed a different-looking engine there; could it be a Hemi?
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