Hurley's car

I'm a big fan of "Lost," and I like checking out shooting scenes on the island, but I figured that The Sonagi Consortium was a more suitable place than Monster Island (hmm... that doesn't sound right). Besides, what better way than this to inaugurate my own presence on this hodgepodge blog. 

So I happened to take "M" over in the direction of Kapiolani Community College (KCC), which is across the street from the entrance to the crater of Diamond Head. Just Koko Head* side of KCC is the Hawaii Film Studio [photo below, location here], which is the Aloha State's answer to Universal Studios.

This is the facility which is used by filmmakers and television producers to supplement their outdoor shooting in the state. Films like Jurassic Park, Fifty First Dates, South Pacific, etc., and television shows like "Magnum P.I.," "Hawaii Five-O," and my current favorite, "Lost," are filmed here and around the island. You may recall my ephemeral "encounter" with actor Michael Emerson, who plays the self-serving and very creepy Ben Linus, in the big Safeway down on Kapahulu. 

It's small scale by California standards, and a drive around the block can reveal a thing or two. Baby-blue Dharma vans have been spotted on occasion, and when we were approaching the old KCC church (where I used to take taiko drum classes, which is totally kick-ass), we spied a truck of the FedEx/UPS variety (I know my UPS trucks — possibly NSFW link) with the Oceanic Airlines logo.

It's a little hard to see there in this iPhone-snapped photo, but it's there (it's much clearer if you happen to be walking by). 

Oceanic 815, of course, is the fictitious flight most of the main characters of "Lost" were on when they crashed on the mysterious island, but I don't recall seeing an Oceanic van of any kind, so I wonder if it's something that will pop up in the later season six episodes. 

We did have a chance to swing around and drive up to an isolated service entrance just makai* of the main entrance, where we spotted the old car [top photo] that was fixed up by the father (played by famed 1970s stoner comic Cheech Marin) of Hugo "Hurley" Reyes (played by Jorge Garcia — I like this link). That was quite a treat. 

"Gitsie Girl" describes one of the episodes in which it appears, and "Lost Virtual Tour" has some scenes showing the car in action, not far from where the Costco is, so maybe I'll check out that street corner sometime.

By the way, Jorge Garcia took the Los Angeles Times on a special little tour of the island, showing various "Lost" locations, which I might blog here or at Monster Island (actually a peninsula), supplemented by my own trips to those places. There's a video here.

Garcia's character is one of my favorite on the show — among other functions, he voices things that fans and viewers themselves say about the show — and he himself looks like he'd be a fun guy to hang out with. Since he's saying he'd rather not leave the island (Oahu, that is), I hope I get to run into him at Safeway sometime. It might be less creepy than encounter Ben in the dairy section. 

* Directions on Oahu and the rest of Hawaii are frequently given with the words makai (toward the ocean, on the ocean side of some place) or mauka (toward the mountains, or on the mountain side of some place). If you're on the southern side of Oahu, where Honolulu is, then makai is south and mauka is north. East and west are determined by an actual geographic mark as a point: Ewa (pronounced ay-vah) to the west and usually Diamond Head to the east. But if you're east of Diamond Head (e.g., Kahala, Hawaii Kai, KCC, etc.), then Diamond is actually to the south or the west, so at some point Koko Head becomes the eastward reference point.