People of a certain age will remember the first time they saw Napoleon Dynamite, the obscure comedy about a unique Idaho high schooler, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. If the plot is hard to remember, you should still recall the “Vote For Pedro” t-shirt, Napoleon (Jon Heder) dancing to Jamiroquai’s “Canned Heat” and the forever-stuck-in-the-past Uncle Rico attempting to hurl a football over some faraway mountains.

Then there’s Uncle Rico’s burnt-orange passenger van, what some folks 40-odd years ago may call a “shaggin’ wagon.” Specifically, it’s a 1975 Dodge Tradesman 300. There’s only one Uncle Rico’s van in existence, and it happens to be parked in the Houston area. 

“I was looking for movie cars online and my wife wanted to get a ‘Scooby Doo’ van, so I was looking for vans and this popped up,” said Mark Shields, a Houston area resident who owns four vehicles that are either straight from the movie set or are replicas that match famous cars from movies and television. “I was like ‘Oh, it’s close.’”

The van will be getting some attention this week. As Napoleon Dynamite stars Heder and Efren Ramirez (Pedro) mark 20 years by visiting Houston for Comicpalooza, set for May 24-26 at George R. Brown Convention Center, Uncle Rico’s Van will be on display at Comicpalooza over the weekend, thanks to the folks at Eureka Heights Brewing Co.

The van had lived a few lives before Shields purchased it for what he said was “under $15,000.” According to Shields’ documentation, the van was bought in 2000 by a couple in Preston, Idaho. Three years later, the couple was driving past the Napoleon Dynamite shoot in Preston, where director Jared Hess and his crew flagged them down. The couple let the filmmaker use the van for no fee, and one year later, the Dodge Tradesman was immortalized in a cult classic.

Then the van ended up in the hands of buyers in Los Alamitos, California; Millersport, Ohio; and Grand Rapids, Michigan. In 2010, Shields was living in Minneapolis when he came across the van, buying it from the owner in Grand Rapids. In 2015, he and his wife moved to the Houston area and have since kept the van in a secret location. Anyone within a 25-mile radius of Houston can rent the van through Shields’ website UncleRicoVan.com—$125 per hour at a four-hour minimum—and only for static display. Sorry, you can’t drive the van.

Shields admits the van has only been rented out a handful of times locally, primarily for weddings. Otherwise, 20th Century Fox and Walt Disney Studios have used the van for special Napoleon Dynamite events. In 2019, ESPN reached out to Shields to bring the van to Jacksonville for a short film starring Uncle Rico (Jonathan Gries) and then-Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback Gardner Minshew.

Though it’s an old vehicle with plenty of history, Shields said the van runs well, thanks in part to transmission and exhaust work he did on it two years ago. Plus, he fixed the gas pedal, which was previously held together by a string. Shields said the odometer reads 79,000 miles, but he’s pretty sure it has rolled over before and well beyond that mark.

Do people recognize the van if it’s out on the street?

“Sometimes when I’m driving, people will drive up to me and go ‘Yeah man! The movie! It’s about a 50-50 thing,” Shields said. “I kind of like that, too. True fans know the van and they’ll sort of honk their horn … versus the DeLorean, which everyone knows.”

About that: Shields also owns a replica DeLorean, outfitted to look like Dr. Emmett Brown’s time machine from the Back to the Future series. The original 1985 film is Shields’ favorite movie, and after years of dreaming that he’d own a DeLorean and travel the country in it, he bought his in 1998 and also rents that out for static display. 

But that isn’t all. Shields also rents out Back to the Future movie props, including the actual video camera Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) operates in the Twin Pines Mall parking lot and Doc Brown’s radiation goggles. And he has a replica K.I.T.T. car from the 1980s TV series Knight Rider and a replica Bumblebee Camaro from Transformers. Plus, he owns 140 vintage arcade games that he restores, including hard to find titles from the late 1970s and early ‘80s. You can see it all on his TikTok (@spacetimejunction). In other words, Shields is a master of pop culture memorabilia.

“That’s my thing,” Shields said, laughing. By day he’s an application developer, though one day he would love to open an event center or arcade where he can show off his restored games and pop culture cars. “But I could not sustain myself if I just owned cars rented for static display. I’d love to change my whole lifestyle.”

Until then, you’ll have to either rent out Shields’ cars or look for them out in the wild. Next weekend, Uncle Rico’s van will finally get his Houston close-up. 

“Nostalgia is a heck of a drug and people seem to enjoy it. That’s why certain celebrities get to go to comic conventions indefinitely,” Shields said. “The van is like a character in the movie. We feel lucky that we’re the custodian of it, and that Jon Gries didn’t want to move into it.”