Abandoned Edsels

I heart old cars - and as a non-driver, I've never known exactly why. This passion only sprang up in the past few years, and in that time I've gone to numerous car shows, taken videos of vintage car "drive-bys", collected antique car photos, and even ridden in a few. But even more creepily fascinating are wrecks - the hulls and husks of ancient rustbuckets left to die in ditches and farmer's fields. Edsels carry a special significance as the white elephant of the auto world - a car so hyped that Ford thought it couldn't fail. Well - it did. Ugliest sucker I ever saw, with a thing like a toilet seat stuck to the front, but even more macabre when wrecked and rotting, its parts falling off and rusted through. 

Ginger ninja

 

 

Mojo in chrome

                                          Moan, moan, moan.
                   
                   

Abandoned Edsels

I love old cars, but I hate Edsels, boxy, low-riding, with that hideous triangular toilet seat glommed on to the front. But seeing them abandoned and rusting away like this is somehow comforting. Collectors cherish these things because of their rarity, and the taint forever associated with it: from then on, anything which bombed badly after a huge buildup was called an "Edsel". The fact it was named after Henry Ford's son made the failure particularly excruciating. Wikipedia explains it like this:

Edsel and its failures

Historians have advanced several theories in an effort to explain the Edsel's failure. Popular culture often faults the car’s styling. Consumer Reports has alleged that poor workmanship was the Edsel's chief problem. Marketing experts hold the Edsel up as a supreme example of the corporate culture’s failure to understand American consumers. Business analysts cite the weak internal support for the product inside Ford’s executive offices. According to author and Edsel scholar* Jan Deutsch, the Edsel was "the wrong car at the wrong time."

"The aim was right, but the target moved"

The Edsel is most notorious for being a marketing disaster. The name "Edsel" became synonymous with the real-life commercial failure of the predicted "perfect" product or product idea. Similar ill-fated products have often been colloquially referred to as "Edsels". Ford's own Sierra model, which launched almost 25 years later, is often compared to the Edsel owing to initial buyer antipathy to its perceived radical styling, even though, unlike the Edsel, it ultimately became a sales success. 

Since the Edsel program was such a debacle, it gave marketers a vivid illustration of how not to market a product. The principal reason the Edsel's failure is so infamous is that Ford had absolutely no idea that the failure was going to happen until after the vehicles had been designed and built, the dealerships established and $400 million invested in the product's development and launch. Incredibly, Ford had presumed to invest $400 million (well over $4.0 billion in the 21st century) in developing a new product line without attempting to determine whether such an investment would be wise or prudent.

The prerelease advertising campaign promoted the car as having "more YOU ideas", and the teaser advertisements in magazines only revealed glimpses of the car through a highly blurred lens or wrapped in paper or under tarps. In fact, Ford had never test-marketed the vehicle or its unique styling concepts with potential buyers prior to either the vehicle’s initial development decision or the vehicle’s shipments to its new dealerships. Edsels were shipped to the dealerships undercover and remained wrapped on the dealer lots.

*My only question is: what's an Edsel scholar? Imagine doing THAT all day.

A ball in the Lark!

There is something very strange about this video, because it's neither black-and-white nor colour: it's pink! Washed-out pink, almost pinkish-grey, ashes-of-roses pink. I suppose this is the effect of ageing, film stock changing colour as it slowly degenerates.

I became re-fascinated (as opposed to re-fastened) with the Studebaker Lark when a certain jingle recently popped into my head: "You're gonna have a ball in the Lark/The '62 Lark!" This ad ran on TV when I was eight years old, and I remember it as if it were yesterday. Certain ads seem permanently recorded in my brain, along with a lot of other useless stuff.

I'm trying to find one that goes, "Plymouth's on the move, Plymouth, Plymouth, Plymouth's on the move. . . ", but so far no luck.

It interests me how this car is presented. Obviously it's a jazzed-up version of what used to be a very stodgy, dull family car. The fact that the woman who drives it is running around in a bathing suit is never explained, but the voiceover insists that it's a "very sexy car". I believe this short film was meant for dealers rather than consumers, but it's still very interesting. They're obviously supposed to give it a certain spin.

It didn't work, and Studebaker collapsed, I think the year after the "ball in the Lark" ad (video below). Up to that point, the "Studey" had been a serviceable, solid, conservative car. A safe bet. Did the Lark kill it? More likely, it was competition from the other swank sports cars of the era: the T-bird (of Beach Boys fame), the Stingray, the Porsche 911.

And yes, I had to look those up.

Though I've made some very long gifs of these ads (OH how I love to make gifs of old car ads, late at night!), I want to include the
"ball in the Lark" jingle, along with that hectic dance number, like an Archie comic on amphetamines.

BONUS GIFS:The 1957 Studebaker! For some reason, old ads that are sepia rather than black-and-white make the best gifs. There is a certain crispness to them, and an ivory tone which is quite sensuous. And these are long, about a full minute each, when the average gif is a few seconds.

To me, it already looks pretty sexy. But what do I know.

Two-tone '53 Oldsmobile

Cars with teeth, Vol. II

A stunning candy apple green Studebaker (year unknown - '30s?) which has been customized with fierce chrome teeth. We saw this at the Hard Rock Casino car show a couple of weeks ago. Also has a gorgeous interior.

A car with kaleidoscope eyes

Newspaper taxis appear on the shore,
Waiting to take you away.

Ginger ninja

 

  

 

Cars with teeth

Cars with teeth.

My dream car

Some of these babies are called "lead sleds". They're usually from the 1940s and have been heavily customized so that the '40s features are taken to an extreme. I love these, or anything sleek, classy, timeless, two-toned, chrome-bedecked, gleaming. I like cars that seem to have faces (all of them), or ferocious bared teeth. I like bulbousness. I find old cars voluptuous and even sexy. I have a "thing" for them, even though I don't drive. There's some sort of fetishy thing, there's a name for it - a woman married the Eiffel Tower, that sort of thing. I don't have that, but I have a small trace of it. Maybe more than a trace. Could I marry such a car? I could slide down its bulbousness. They call forth this feeling in me that I don't remember having before the last couple of years. Something must have happened to my brain.

That Buick Girl

Since my discovery/rediscovery of the ravishing Buick ad with the girl leaning on the even-more-ravishing 1946 Buick, I've been tinkering and retooling this post. Naturally, when you see an image this tasty, you're going to want to animate it (or, at least, I am). About the only thing that looked animate-able was her arm. My first few attempts were so stiff that they looked laughable - but then I got onto bending her arm at the elbow. Really, it doesn't look too bad.

Here I alternated the basic wave with a wider gesture which looked a little silly by itself, but seems to fit here. Naturally, these actions aren't going to be smooth. When I get a little better at this, I might find a way to make the actions more natural.

This is the fist-pump, which took quite a long time to do, because I had to mess with the hand to make it look more fist-like.

The free-style. I incorporated several different waves into this one. One of them is a kind of modified fist-pump, or "rah-rah" gesture.

I am SO sick of looking at this now that maybe it was a mistake to work on it. This is one of my all-time-favorite vintage car images. It's just so frickin' perfect. Maybe I need to put it away for a while.

Car porn: vintage autos to die for