Remember that amazing Acura sports car that Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) climbs into at the end of 'The Avengers' so he can ride off into the sunset and head wherever billionaire geniuses hang? It turns out, it was a lemon, spruced up by some traditional movie-making magic.

Sympatico (via Buzzfeed) has a great photo progression showing how behind-the-scenes artists turned an old car with roughly 250,000 miles on its odometer into the envious automobile Stark sped off on. An actual model of the car made its way to the red carpet (pictured above). But Joss Whedon’s team didn’t take any chances on the set of 'The Avengers,' creating a dummy car for their A-list talent to drive around in.

Probably a good idea.

We might see video of this conversion as part of a behind-the-scenes featurette on the 'Avengers' DVD. Now Marvel/Disney, do you mind telling us when we'll get to own that DVD? We’d like to pre-order … like, now.

So Stark's car eventually looks like this:

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But first it looked like this:

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And then it went through this process. Pretty cool, no? 

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