By Eric J. Savitz, editor-in-chief, GM News

In the opening sequence of the 1967 flick “Clambake,” Elvis Presley tools down a highway through the Florida Everglades in a simply stunning red Corvette Stingray concept car, racing an airboat skimming along a nearby swamp.

As the titles finish rolling, The King drives by a sign that says, “Welcome to Florida…The Happy State.” Accompanying the scene is probably the only rock song Elvis or anyone else ever wrote about a clambake, or at least a Florida clambake (shouldn’t he be in Maine?). 

The song is dopey, and the movie is cringey. But the Corvette he’s driving is a sleek and sexy marvel, all chrome and shine and power.

Designed by the late Bill Mitchell, a former GM design VP who did more than anyone on Earth to make the Corvette a style icon, to see that Stingray is to want it. 

Alas, you can’t have it. 

But you can go see it. The Clambake dream machine will shortly join a new exhibit called “An American Love Affair: Pop Culture and Corvette” that just opened at the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky. If you get a chance to visit – the exhibit runs until November 2025 – you should go.

This exhibit is decades overdue. The Corvette has played a major role in films, television, and music for nearly three-quarters of a century. The Internet Movie Cars Database, which has a remarkable archive of info about cars in film and TV productions, counts well north of 3,000 Corvette appearances on screen.  

The exhibit includes a variety of other cool ‘Vettes, like concept cars from the “Transformers” film series, a 1973 Medium Blue Corvette used in the reboot of “Hawaii Five-0” and a seventh generation Corvette concept car that appears in the video game “Gran Turismo 6.”

Also on view: cars with famous current or former owners, with a particular focus on musicians. There are ‘Vettes connected to Brad Paisley and George Jones, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and baseball slugger Reggie Jackson.

Also on display is a 1968 Silverstone Silver Corvette once owned by the astronaut Jim Lovell, who flew on Apollo 8 and Apollo 13. The Lovell exhibit notes that during the 1960s, a Chevrolet dealership near Cape Canaveral offered astronauts the car of their choice for the token sum of $1 a year. (NASA rules prevented them from getting cars for free.) Of the seven original Mercury astronauts, six leased Corvettes. John Glenn, always a scrupulous rule follower, declined.

The Corvette Museum, about an hour north of Nashville, is an independent nonprofit not directly managed by General Motors, although multiple GM execs sit on the museum’s board. The building sits less than a mile from Bowling Green Assembly, a 212-acre site where GM has built every Corvette since 1981.

Bryan Gable, a curator at the museum, said the pop culture exhibit grew out of a previous special display about the 70th anniversary of the Corvette.

“As we were creating that exhibit, one of the topics that really came to mind was Corvette's impact on popular culture,” he said in an interview. “Its presence in movies, TV, inspiration for music, even how much the car itself represents the American values of freedom, adventure, and hitting the open road.” 

The exhibit, displayed in the museum’s airy “Skydome,” includes a looping video that highlights songs, movies and TV shows with Corvette references. 

“We have a segment from the 2009 Star Trek film where the young Captain Kirk is driving a Corvette,” he says. “We have a clip from the TV series ‘For All Mankind,’” which shows the Mercury astronauts jumping into their not-quite-free Corvettes and racing along a Florida highway. “And of course we have Prince in there, singing ‘Little Red Corvette,’ because you can’t leave Prince out, right?”

Nope, you can’t leave out Prince.

Corvette references show up in a wide range of music genres. There were many references in the surf era, from bands like the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean. There’s Prince, but also the Corvette Song by George Jones (really called “The One I Loved Back,”) and “Riding With Private Malone,” a song by David Ball. 

“In ‘Private Malone,’” Gable explains, “the narrator finds a ‘66 Corvette that was owned by a soldier who went to Vietnam. At the end of the song, the narrator gets in a crash with the car and survives. People tell him a soldier pulled him out of the car. And he thinks it's the spirit of the car's previous owner.”

No one writes a song like that about a Ford.

Eric J. Savitz, a former reporter, editor and columnist for Barron’s, Forbes, Smart Money, and other publications, is editor-in-chief of GM News. Not really a Corvette guy, he’s the proud owner of a 2018 Chevy Bolt.