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Get Ready to Drool Over the Amazing Vintage Bikes of the ‘It’ Franchise

Photo credit: Warner Bros Pictures
Photo credit: Warner Bros Pictures

From Bicycling

Scottish actor James McAvoy jumped at the chance to do his own stunts in It: Chapter Two— especially when it called for cruising down suburban streets on a vintage Schwinn. “Getting to ride my bike up the Neibolt Street house was fun because I loved [the bike],” said McAvoy during promotion for the highly-anticipated sequel. “Silver was a big thing for Bill, and for me as a fan of the book.”

Fans of the Stephen King novel, and the first film by Andy Muschietti, will remember Silver as the trusty bicycle of McAvoy’s character Bill Denbrough, which he uses to escape the murderous clown Pennywise during their first meet. The bike makes a return in the sequel, when Bill stumbles across it in the window of the Secondhand Rose antique shop many years later.

The scene features a delightful cameo by King as the bespectacled shopkeeper, who sells the bike back to Bill for an inflated price ($300) once he realizes he has a motivated buyer on the hook.

The cost of the roster of bikes featured in the movie was just a bit higher in real life though, props buyer Daniel Smallegange told Bicycling.

Each of the seven misfit youths from the story, who call themselves the “Losers Club,” had their own unique ride. Their wheels weren’t just a mode of transportation, but were also a huge part of the kids’ ability to combat their evil antagonist, so they had to look right.

Smallegange scoured the internet and local shops to find and purchase period-appropriate models for the 1980s timeline, and then had to figure out how to transport them on set in Toronto, Canada.

[Find 52 weeks of tips and motivation, with space to fill in your mileage and favorite routes, with the Bicycling Training Journal.]

“It was my job to make sure we had pieces that fit the characters and matched the first film,” he says. And not just one bike per character, either: Each of the “Loser” bikes needed an identical backup.

“In the props community, we say that one is none, which means that you aren’t comfortable until you have at least two,” he says.

Silver, written in King’s novel as an early 1960s Schwinn, was the hardest to procure. In the end, the production ended up buying it in parts, which they took into a local shop to be assembled.

“They dropped off a box of parts that we had to make work,” said Sohel Imani of Ya Bikes in Toronto. Getting the bikes ready for their silver screen debut, with a steady stream of notes from the director and production design team about the look they wanted, took two weeks shop time.

The rest of the Losers’s bikes were easier to track down, thanks to the assistance of vintage BMX seller Anthony Bloch of Harvester Bikes in Ontario. Luckily for the producers, Bloch had a stockpile of era-appropriate machines just waiting to be cast.

The collection was sent to Mojo Cycles in Toronto for custom paint jobs before they were handed to the actors. The same shop painted Bill’s Schwinn to look 27 years older when it came time to film the movie’s time hop.

Bloch was excited about the opportunity to supply realistic pieces to such a high-profile movie, and he was up for the challenge—he had previously seen a number of productions using bikes completely wrong for the time, and believes getting it right helps boost the overall aesthetic of the film.

“I love the models of these years, and I know there are many out there that do, too,” he says.

Losers Club members Mike and Bev had more conventional rides—a basket delivery bike and an orange ten-speed, respectively—but here are a few of the inspiration models used for other characters in the It franchise. The bikes made such an impression that they were even brought out for the movie’s red carpet premiere in Los Angeles.

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