#celebrity

Today’s Rare Ride is quite possibly the rarest Chevrolet Celebrity ever made. And it’s also, possibly, one of those cases where rare does not equal desirable.

Turning the sedate Buick Regal into an extra-special Grand National injected some much-needed sportiness into the Buick brand in the early 1980s. And while the Grand National is not as rare as the very limited edition GNX variant, this particular car just happens to have a famous prior owner: David Spade.

Just shoot me.

During the late 20th century, General Motors managed to get at least a couple of decades out of most of their platforms, but GM sold the Chevrolet Celebrity for just the 1982 through 1990 model years. Its A-body platform held on just through the 1996 model year. Celebrities sold very well, but broke often, depreciated in fall-off-a-cliff fashion, and few made it into the current century.Here’s a rare Celebrity wagon I found yesterday in a Denver self-service yard.

Since we had a 1989 General Motors Junkyard Find yesterday, let’s look at another 1989 GM car today. The Chevrolet Celebrity, sold for the 1982 through 1990 model years, was one of those cars that disappeared from our memories without much of a trace. The Celebrity wasn’t as spectacularly bad as the Chevy Citation and its corporate siblings, but nobody loved it (except for these guys) and most examples were fed into the cold steel jaws of The Crusher before the 1990s were over. Here’s an example from the sedan’s final year of production.

When Tom Cruise and the Porsche 928 were taking their star turn together in Risky Business, the star had to be taught how to use a clutch pedal for the driving shots. This is faintly ironic because the 928 was the original iconic automatic-transmission Porsche, designed to use a slushbox from the jump by Ernst Fuhrmann and intended to be a continent-cruiser grand-touring car instead of a wobbly-nosed air-cooled icon.

The midsize Celebrity came between the rear-drive Malibu and the Lumina, went through only one generation, and has been largely forgotten by now. Most examples got crushed before the turn of the century, and the wagons have become especially rare. Here’s a Celebrity wagon with the not-very-European Eurosport option package, spotted at a San Francisco Bay Area self-serve yard.