Manta, Manta

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Movie
Original title Manta, Manta
Manta manta film.svg
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1991
length 87 minutes
Age rating FSK 6
Rod
Director Wolfgang Büld
script Stefan Cantz
production Bernd Eichinger
Peter Zenk
Martin Moszkowicz
music Stefan Will
camera Roland Willaert
cut Gisela Haller
occupation

Manta, Manta is a German action comedy from 1991. The producers Bernd Eichinger , Peter Zenk and Martin Moszkowicz realized the film with Constantin Film , directed by Wolfgang Büld . Actors like Til Schweiger , Tina Ruland and Michael Kessler started their careers with this film. The film had around 1.2 million moviegoers and 11.48 million viewers when it was first broadcast on RTL in 1992 .

Four weeks before the cinema release, Manta - The Film was released in German cinemas, which also deals with the Opel Manta in a comedic way .

action

Opel Manta B from the movie "Manta, Manta"
Tina Ruland and Til Schweiger signed autographs on the bonnet

In the Ruhr area : Bertie is the proud owner of a tuned manta ray with a Mattig wide body. With his friends Gerd, Hakan and Klausi, he shares a passion for the Manta and the tuning that goes with it. When the four of them are on the road with some other Manta colleagues, Bertie takes on a GTI driver on a four-lane road . In order to create a clear path for the race, the remaining mantas block the traffic behind Bertie and his opponent at a relaxed speed. Much to the displeasure of Axel, a yuppie and Mercedes driver who is in a hurry. After Axel struggled through the column of manta rays after a bump in the rear of Hakan's Manta, he tries to catch up with Bertie and the GTI driver. Meanwhile, Bertie narrowly wins the race against the GTI with a risky maneuver in front of a construction site. At the meeting point, her regular snack bar, Bertie makes fun of the defeated GTI driver. While the offended one leaves, the angry Axel arrives and ventes his anger at the mantas and their behavior. After a brief battle of words between Axel and Bertie, it is clear that the disputes should be resolved in a race between Axel and Bertie. Bertie is risking the money he and his friend Uschi, a hairdresser from Hagen , had saved for their first apartment together. Gerd and Uschi try to stop Bertie because the Manta (with 150 HP according to Gerd) is clearly inferior to the Mercedes 190E from Axel (according to him, a "16 valve" with at least 185 HP) in terms of engine power. However, Bertie still decides to race against Axel. While Gerd continues to stick with him, Uschi is not very enthusiastic about the plans. When Uschi overslept the next morning and Bertie is supposed to drive her to work, there is an argument because Bertie wants to wash the manta beforehand. Annoyed, Uschi takes the way to work into her own hands and meets Helmut, a disco operator and Ferrari 328 GTS driver. He offers to drive her to work and invites her to a ballot in his disco. To make Bertie jealous, Uschi accepts the offer.

Bertie's friendship with Gerd also gets a bitter damper when it comes out that Gerd has secretly made up for his Abitur at night school. Meanwhile, Klausi, the clumsy cliché Manta driver with little luck with women, has his birthday. When Gerd gives him his manta as a birthday present for a day, Klausi manages to land with Angie, the cashier at the gas station. What Klausi doesn't know, however: Angie was hired by Hakan so that Klausi would also get a chance with a woman. A little later Klausi picks up Angie with Gerd's manta for a swim. After a short break on the way there, Klausi accidentally drives into Helmut while pulling out of a parking space and escapes. Helmut wants to confront Klausi and there is a chase between Helmut in the Ferrari and Klausi in the Manta, which ends with Klausi and Angie ending up with Gerd's Manta in the quarry pond. Thanks to Hakan's help, however, the car can be recovered from the lake and brought back into a running condition without Gerd noticing anything later.

Meanwhile, Bertie and Gerd are on their way to football in the Westfalenstadion , as Borussia Dortmund is facing a home game against Bayern Munich . To do Bertie's father a favor, however, they first have to deliver his pigeons to an exhibition. There Gerd flirts with the radio intern Florentine, but he is disturbed by Bertie, who absolutely wants to be in the stadium on time for the kick-off. On the way there, Gerd is visibly upset about the missed opportunity at Florentine. On the way to the stadium there were taunts between Dortmund fans Bertie and Gerd and four FC Bayern fans who are out and about in a 3 Series BMW . When Bertie tries, despite Gerd's warning, to beat the FC Bayern fans in a BMW at a traffic light race, the Manta suffers engine damage. On Gerd's initiative, they push the Manta to Gerd's training workshop, where they swap the defective engine for a 270 hp engine from a racing touring car on a night shift. When Bertie and Gerd drive to the disco, they meet Uschi there, who wants to take part in the contest to which they invited Helmut. It quickly becomes apparent that Helmut is interested in Uschi. Unnoticed by Uschi, Helmut knocks down Bertie and goes to the disco with Uschi. Bertie and Gerd drive to their regular snack bar, where Bertie gets drunk out of frustration at Uschi's behavior, although he still wants to race against Axel. When, to top it off, Florentine makes fun of Bertie and his Manta on the radio, Bertie loses her composure. Gerd and Bertie (the meanwhile completely drunk) then go to the radio station where Florentine works and whose chief presenter likes to tell manta jokes on the radio. The two break into the broadcast studio, disguised as the two musicians "Napalm Duo", and the manta jokes lead to a tussle between Bertie and the chief presenter. Meanwhile, Gerd tries to get closer to Florentine. The action ends with Bertie, Gerd and also Florentine being kicked out. On the way to the race, Gerd and Florentine get closer while Berti sleeps in the back seat.

During a stop at the disco, however, the drunk Bertie manages to get behind the wheel of the manta ray and drive to the race himself. Gerd and Florentine stay behind. Meanwhile, Uschi wins the contest, but at the same time learns from her friend that she is pregnant. When Gerd explains to her that Bertie intends to drive the race, Uschi sets out with Helmut's Ferrari to stop Bertie. At the last moment she arrives at the race and can stop Bertie by arguing that he is going to be a father. Klausi, who has secretly put himself in the Manta, asks Axel to compete against him and Bertie's Manta. After Klausi stalled the engine on the first attempt to start, the race started on the second attempt and Axel turned out to be the much better driver. However, to Axel's surprise, Klausi can keep up with him thanks to the 270 hp engine in the Manta. During the race, the angry Helmut arrives and gets violent towards Uschi, but this time Bertie knocks him down, whereupon the entire group is banned from dining in Helmut's disco. At the same moment that Helmut drives away in anger in his Ferrari, Klausi and Axel turn the bend at high speed. Axel collides head-on with Helmut's Ferrari, which looks like a ski jump. After a jump and a rollover, Axel's Mercedes remains badly damaged on a meadow. However, the friends and colleagues manage to pull Axel out of the Mercedes almost unharmed. When Axel sees his wrecked car, he starts to cry and says the legendary words "My beautiful Benz ...".

The group then sorts itself. Uschi and Bertie are reconciled, Florentine and Gerd are a couple and Klausi also accepts Angie, who was hired by Hakan, as his girlfriend, because they actually have feelings for each other. Hakan, in turn, meets Uschi's initially shy friend Sabine.

background

With Til Schweiger, Martin Armknecht and Horst Scheel , three actors known from Lindenstrasse at the time were represented. For some of the young actors, including Schweiger, the commercial success of Manta, Manta became a springboard for their further careers. In Michael Kessler's case, the role was so formative that he is approached in several episodes in the television series Pastewka about the scene in which he urinates in his boots.

As a kind of running gag , a number of manta jokes are told during the film on Radio 88 . The studio scene at Radio88 was recorded on the premises of the local radio station Radio Neandertal in Mettmann (near Wuppertal). Many film sequences were shot in Wuppertal , the school scenes were recorded in the Sedanstraße high school there in Wuppertal-Barmen. The scenes around Bertie's parents' house were shot in Oberhausen , in the listed estate Dunkelschlag (Zechenstrasse and the corner of Weselerstrasse) in the Alsfeld district . The scenes at the beginning (the mantas against Axel) were shot in Dortmund near the Technical University, between the north and south campuses. For this purpose, the never completed upgraded line, today Universitätsstrasse, was used. The university skyscraper can also be seen briefly (math tower) and the student dormitory on Meitnerweg, which was under construction at the time of shooting. The end of the upgraded route with numerous warning signs, a sharp right-hand bend where first Bertie, then the GTI driver and finally Axel drive past a broken-down truck, is the transition from Universitätsstraße to Baroper Straße. This no longer exists. because a new north-south connection called Marie-Curie-Allee has been built. The scene in which Bertie with the Manta initially drives next to the radio presenter's Citroen 2 CV ("duck") and later on to a stationary car transporter was filmed in an industrial park in Witten (Wullener Feld, Liegnitzer Strasse).

The theme song Manta! Manta! the film was written by Jörg Evers under the pseudonym "Manni Ickx". The title We drive Manta Manta , which you hear in the chase scene with Klausi in Gerd's Manta and Helmut in a Ferrari, comes from the Berlin punk band King Køng under the pseudonym “Die Motoristen”. King Køng dissolved in 1993 in favor of the re-establishment of Die Ärzte .

In the film, Bertie's Manta has 150 hp, not 110 hp, as is often assumed and is actually correct. This becomes clear in the scene in which Gerd and Bertie take the test drive with the freshly installed 270 hp engine. Gerd Bertie points out there that he now has “120 hp more under the hood”. In fact, the film vehicle had around 135 hp. From March 2017 to January 2018, the Manta was on display in a special exhibition in the House of History in Bonn .

criticism

"In the Ruhr area, a film that is closely based on the Manta myth" and which lacks convincing ideas as well as intellectual autonomy. "

Possible continuation

In 2008, rumors about a second part entitled Manta, Manta 2 were first heard. In 2010 it was officially mentioned that they were working on it. A release date of November 11, 2010 appeared in various cinema film databases. However, with the death of producer Bernd Eichinger in January 2011, the Manta, Manta 2 project was also frozen. In July 2015, it was speculated that the sequel Manta, Manta 2 should come to the cinemas for the 25th anniversary of the first part , but this was ultimately not the case. The leading actors at the time showed great interest in a sequel. In 2018, Til Schweiger once again indicated interest in a sequel in an interview that should show what became of the characters decades later. However, the film rights for a sequel were with Constantin Film and he was under contract with Warner Brothers , which is why Constantin would have to develop the script himself. His proposal to buy the film rights from Constantin Film was rejected. In 2019 Constantin Film announced that they had been working “for some time on a concept and script for a second part”.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. RTL Extra - magazine for the 10th anniversary of RTL
  2. It is a BMW 325i modified to the Kelleners KS3 , cf. the IMCDb entry .
  3. Locations of the Manta Manta film. Retrieved January 26, 2018 (German).
  4. Thomas Kliemann: The Manta is now in Bonn. In: General-Anzeiger (Bonn) . February 6, 2017, accessed January 11, 2018 .
  5. Manta, Manta. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  6. Schweizer makes “Manta, Manta 2”. In: 20 minutes . February 3, 2010, accessed December 29, 2017 .
  7. Manta, Manta is coming back. In: n-tv . July 8, 2015, accessed December 29, 2017 .
  8. Til Schweiger: Why it will probably never work with “Manta Manta 2”. In: klatsch-tratsch.de. September 12, 2018, accessed July 18, 2019 .
  9. Manta, Manta 2: With Til Schweiger (update). In: Auto Zeitung . May 8, 2019, accessed July 18, 2019 .