Dodge Called It “Top Banana” Yellow On Purpose — This 1970 Super Bee’s 440 Six-Pack Made the Hemi Look Slow

Dodge built the 1970 Super Bee to be seen and heard, from the Top Banana paint to the triple two-barrel carbs poking through the hood. Here’s why the 440 Six-Pack version quietly outdrove the far pricier Hemi on real streets, and why so few survive today.

Dodge didn’t accidentally paint this car a color loud enough to stop traffic. “Top Banana” was a real, official factory paint code in 1970, and Dodge’s marketing team knew exactly what they were doing when they slapped it on a Super Bee. This particular example, a 1970 Super Bee 440 Six-Pack from the Brothers Collection, wears that Top Banana finish with a white interior and matching stripe package, and it doesn’t so much arrive at a car show as announce itself. But the paint is the least interesting thing about it. Underneath that hood-mounted scoop sits a 440 cubic-inch V8 breathing through three two-barrel Holley carburetors, an engine that, dollar for dollar and stoplight for stoplight, gave Chrysler’s vaunted 426 Hemi a real run for its money. This is the story of why Dodge built a “budget” muscle car that quietly out-argued its own flagship.

What You’ll See in This Video

This week’s feature comes from the long-running Muscle Car Of The Week video series, which has spent years pulling rare survivors and immaculate restorations out of private collections to give them a proper walkaround. Episode #21 puts the spotlight on this 1970 Dodge Super Bee, and the car does most of the talking. The Top Banana Yellow paint is set off by a white vinyl interior, white stripe treatment, and the unmistakable Super Bee graphics package that Dodge used to separate its budget muscle car from the pricier Coronet R/T sitting next to it on the showroom floor.

What makes this particular Super Bee a standout even among Six-Pack cars is how visible its performance hardware is. The triple-carb 440 isn’t hidden away — the hood itself is functional, feeding air straight into the middle carburetor, and the whole package is designed to be noticed from the outside as much as felt from the driver’s seat. As the video notes, this isn’t a car for anyone who prefers to blend in. Between the color, the stripes, and the sound of three two-barrels opening up, it draws a crowd wherever it goes.

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Cars like this one tend to end up in serious private collections precisely because they check every box a Mopar collector looks for: a desirable High Impact color, the correct white interior and stripe combination, and the numbers-matching 440 Six-Pack under the hood rather than a later engine swap. A well-documented Super Bee with its original fender tag, broadcast sheet, and matching build codes is worth significantly more — and is far rarer to find — than a car that’s simply been dressed up to look the part. That documentation trail is a big part of why a feature like this one, straight from a private collection, carries so much weight with serious enthusiasts.

The Story Behind the Dodge Super Bee

The Super Bee arrived in 1968 as Dodge’s answer to a very specific problem: Plymouth had just launched the Road Runner, a stripped-down, back-to-basics muscle car built on the same corporate B-body platform, and it was selling like crazy. Dodge needed its own low-cost, high-performance model, so it took the Coronet, added serious hardware, and gave it a name that leaned into the platform code itself — “Super Bee” is a play on B-body, dressed up with a cartoon bumblebee mascot that became one of the most recognizable badges of the muscle car era. The formula was simple: keep the price down, keep the options list short, and let a big-block engine do the marketing.

Half a model year into 1969, Dodge dropped in the option that would define the car’s legend: the A12 package, pairing a 440 wearing three two-barrel Holley carburetors — the “Six Pack” — with a lift-off fiberglass hood, matte black finish, and chrome hood pins. It was a genuinely unusual thing for a factory to sell: a race-inspired, budget-priced big-block car that undercut the Hemi’s price by a wide margin while, in a lot of real-world street situations, actually outrunning it. The Six Pack’s three carburetors worked in stages, idling on the center carb alone for fuel economy and drivability, then opening the two outboard carbs under hard acceleration for a surge of extra fuel and air exactly when it was needed. The result was an engine with broader, more usable torque than the high-strung, harder-to-tune 426 Hemi, without the Hemi’s finicky idle or its much higher price tag and insurance surcharge.

For 1970, Dodge gave the Coronet-based Super Bee a significant facelift, adopting the twin-loop “bumble bee” front bumper and grille treatment that instantly signaled which model you were looking at, along with bold new stripe graphics and a lineup of factory “High Impact” colors — Top Banana, Plum Crazy, Go Mango, and others — designed specifically to be seen from across a parking lot. Buyers could still order the Super Bee with a standard 335-horsepower 383 Magnum, step up to the high-performance 383, or go all the way to the 426 Hemi, but the 440 Six-Pack remained the sweet spot: nearly Hemi-level performance, a noticeably lower price, and an engine that was far friendlier to live with day to day. 1970 would prove to be the last year the Super Bee wore Coronet sheet metal — for 1971 it moved to the Charger platform for a single model year before Dodge retired the name for good as insurance rates and emissions rules closed in on the entire muscle car category.

That timing wasn’t a coincidence. By 1970, insurance companies had started charging punishing surcharges on anything with a big-block engine, and automakers knew the horsepower race couldn’t run forever. Dodge’s answer was to lean harder into visual identity — the loud colors, the bold graphics, the cartoon bee — so a car could still feel like an event even as the industry quietly braced for tighter emissions rules and a shrinking list of high-compression engine options just a couple of years away. In that light, the Super Bee’s image-first approach wasn’t just marketing flair, it was a genuinely smart way to keep the muscle car spirit alive as the performance ceiling started coming down around it.

Why the 440 Six-Pack Still Wins Arguments

Talk to any serious Mopar collector and you’ll find plenty of them who’ll take a well-sorted 440 Six-Pack car over a numbers-matching Hemi, and it isn’t just about the money saved up front. The Six-Pack setup makes its power lower in the rev range, which translates to a car that’s genuinely quicker off the line in real-world street conditions rather than just on paper at high RPM. It’s also considerably easier to keep tuned and running right, which matters enormously to owners who actually want to drive these cars instead of trailering them to shows. Add in the visual drama of the factory hood scoop, the High Impact paint, and the graphics package, and the 440 Six-Pack Super Bee delivers nearly everything the Hemi promises for a fraction of the ownership headache.

That combination of scarcity, drivability, and sheer curb presence is exactly why cars like this Top Banana example have become such a focal point for serious collections. Six-Pack production numbers were always a small slice of total Super Bee output, and surviving examples that still wear their original color combination and correct engine are increasingly hard to find. What started life as Dodge’s value-priced alternative to the Hemi has, five decades later, become one of the most respected performance packages of the entire muscle car era — proof that sometimes the smarter engineering choice ages a lot better than the flashier one.

The collector market has caught on to this over the last couple of decades. Where Hemi cars have always commanded the headline auction prices, well-documented 440 Six-Pack Super Bees have steadily closed the gap, driven by buyers who want the performance and the presence without the Hemi’s reputation for being temperamental daily transportation. A car finished in a genuine High Impact color like Top Banana, with its original interior and stripe package intact, sits near the top of that market — not because it’s the rarest engine option Dodge ever built, but because it represents the whole package the Super Bee was designed to deliver: attainable performance wrapped in a color you can’t ignore.

For anyone hunting for a real one, the details matter enormously. A genuine 440 Six-Pack Super Bee should carry a fender tag with the correct engine code, and the trim and paint codes on that tag need to match the car in front of you — a lot of clones and tribute cars have been built over the years by dropping a 440 into a lesser Super Bee or even a plain Coronet. The factory lift-off fiberglass hood, when equipped, the correct Air Grabber or scooped hood hardware, and the specific Six-Pack intake and carburetor setup are all details a knowledgeable inspector will check line by line before writing a check. It’s tedious work, but it’s exactly why a documented, collection-quality example like the one in this video commands so much respect — everything about it lines up.

Fifty-plus years on, that’s still the appeal. The 1970 Super Bee wasn’t built to be subtle, and it wasn’t built to be the fastest car Chrysler could engineer at any cost. It was built to be a genuinely quick, genuinely loud, genuinely fun car that a working buyer could actually afford — and that combination is exactly why examples like this Top Banana 440 Six-Pack still turn heads at every show they attend.

Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.