Jeep Gladiator Masterfully Reimagined with ’70s Retro Style
If you think the Gladiator looks a little too modern, The Sketch Monkey has the perfect retro alternative.
Obviously, we love pretty much everything about the Jeep Gladiator. It’s the pickup that we’ve been panning for for years, and it’s finally here. The Gladiator is an inherently useful and capable vehicle that does what no other mid-size pickup on the market today can do. But every year, we admittedly drool over Jeep’s many retro concepts it derives for the Easter Jeep Safari. And this retro Gladiator concept, dreamed up by master artist Marouane Bembli (otherwise known as The Sketch Monkey), hits us squarely in those nostalgic feels.
After all, the Gladiator name itself was revived from the classic Jeep pickup of the ’60s and early ’70s. So why shouldn’t it also pack seriously retro looks? We get that it was much easier, more efficient, and likely cheaper to just make this essentially a Wrangler pickup. But we can certainly dream. And by dream, we mean drool over this rendering, which essentially combines a classic Wagoneer grille and lots of chrome with the brand new Gladiator.
In reality, of course, the process wasn’t quite that simple. “We can’t just take the front of a Wagoneer, slap it on the Gladiator, and not do anything else about it,” Bembli admits. “We have to kinda have the rest of the body as well follow the same design language.”
As you can see in the fascinating video, that involves a little massaging of the front end to make everything line up just right. The most difficult part, however, was adding in all that chrome trim. But the end result is something that looks absolutely killer. And it even gives us a little hope that maybe, just maybe, Jeep will build something like this one day!
Photos: The Sketch Monkey
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