Veluzat's Red Dawn VISMODs

 

A Soviet T-72 on Main Street
Red Dawn (1984)  

 The Veluzat brothers of Southern California have been providing military vehicle props for Hollywood for over 20 years.  Veluzat Army Retails has a large motor pool which includes vintage condition military trucks, jeeps, and tanks as well as vehicles that have been extensively modified to represent rare or otherwise unavailable AFVs in movies.  Excelling at the art of VISMOD , The Veluzat brothers supervised the construction of a small army of full scale prop replicas of Soviet vehicles which included: two T-72s main battle tanks, a tracked BMD APC, an 8 wheeled BTR-60 APC, a tracked ZSU-23-4 anti-aircraft vehicle, a number of 4 wheeled BRDM-2 armored cars,  and 3 Hind attack helicopters for the 1984 film "Red Dawn ."  In 1984 the Cold War was still being waged and all these Russian vehicles were still front line weapons in Soviet and Warsaw Pact armies, so there was no chance that the production company, United Artists, was going to be able to use real vehicles to stage mock invasion of the US by Soviet, Cuban and Nicaraguan forces.

The Veluzat rendition of the Russian T-72 MBT was so good that supposedly a heavy hauler moving  one of the vehicles was stopped on the road by U.S. government authorities who believed the VISMOD was really was a Soviet tank.  Veluzat used a number of surplus U.S. Army M8A1 Cargo Tractors as the surrogates for their T-72s, ZSU-23-4 and an American M1 Abrams tank in "Red Dawn."  The M8A1 Cargo Tractor was an ideal surrogate for the T-72 and other AFVs because of the size and profile of its chassis, its type of running gear and number of road wheels, and most importantly the ready supply of Army surplus spare parts.  The M8A1 shared the many of the same parts as the M41 light tank and while both vehicles were retired from U.S. service well before 1984, a large pool of spare parts was available due to M41s still in service with a number of other armies around the world.

The "Red Dawn" VISMODs would go on to be used in a number of films over the years and in some form or another most of these vehicles are still available for film rental 22 years later.