Home » Can You Sell Hondas With Pooping Babies?: Cold Start

Can You Sell Hondas With Pooping Babies?: Cold Start

Cs Hondapoop Top
ADVERTISEMENT

The Honda Civic has always been a very appealing little car, and it’s generally not been hard to sell it. It’s got all sorts of qualities practical car buyers would want, and you’d think it’d be a strong seller in places like, say, Germany, which has a long history with appreciating small, practical cars. Advertising a car like the Civic in Germany should be pretty straightforward, right? How hard could it be? Why I bet the only way you could somehow go off the rails here is if you were to do something really bonkers, like making an ad with a colossal, shitting baby. Oh no.

Yes, that image up there is from what seems to be a 1980 Honda print ad (it was presented to me as being from 1980, but I think 1980 Civics was the start of the second-gen, which looks different than the one shown here) featuring an image of what seems to be a massive baby defecating into a sort of potty.

Vidframe Min Top
Vidframe Min Bottom

Here, look for yourself:

Cs Hondapoop Ad1

The baby seems to be playing withs some cars that, for some reason, don’t seem to be toys, but full-sized cars? I’m not exactly sure why I’m reading the ad this way, but after translating it, I think I may be wrong:

ADVERTISEMENT

Cs Hondapoop Trans

Okay, so maybe those are toy cars. But this is the first time I’ve heard of a “car Philistine,” at least if I can trust this machine-translation. I’m also pretty sure this is the first time I’ve seen “ineradicable” in a car ad, which makes this ad doubly important: the first ad with that word, and, more importantly, the only car ad I can think of with a big baby taking a dump.

The style of the ad is interesting, too. I generally like this sort of expressive, evocative, coarse sort of line art, though I don’t think this is a great example. You know what’s a better example? This:

Cs Hondapoop 2cv

Rough, quick, expressive, crude, messy, but also charming and eye-catching and perfectly capturing the feel of that Citroën 2CV. I don’t think a modern car ad is likely to try this approach, as it violates all sorts of expected norms about polish and refinement and status. But I think that’s a shame, because this style had some real charm.

ADVERTISEMENT

Even when showing a baby shitting.

Share on facebook
Facebook
Share on whatsapp
WhatsApp
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on linkedin
LinkedIn
Share on reddit
Reddit
Subscribe
Notify of
32 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
David Smith
David Smith
17 days ago

Odd that the add at the bottom of this post was for jumbo sized packages of Pampers.

10001010
10001010
18 days ago

I vote we change the name of the site to “Car Philistines”.com

Hoonicus
Hoonicus
18 days ago

That only works in politics.

PlatinumZJ
PlatinumZJ
18 days ago

So basically it’s a giant man-baby, which actually looks worse the more you look at it.

And what is supposed to be spattered all over that palm tree? D:

Freelivin2713
Freelivin2713
17 days ago
Reply to  PlatinumZJ

Oh yeah! That’s Melon Husk
AKA Melonhead

Martin Ibert
Martin Ibert
18 days ago

Your machine translation had missed the main point. Not “played with a CAR” (and not with something else), but “played with ONE car” (and not with the other cars).

Canopysaurus
Canopysaurus
18 days ago

I think it’s a visual metaphor for German car buyers who turn their noses up at a small imports. Figuratively speaking, with the new Honda, it’s time to shit or get off of the pot.

Mr. Frick
Mr. Frick
18 days ago

God, when I first saw that lede, I thought “I knew it would come to this. Hondas putting changing stations in an SUV and touting them as an option.”

Balloondoggle
Balloondoggle
18 days ago
Reply to  Mr. Frick

There was a time in my life when that would have been helpful….

TriangleRAD
TriangleRAD
18 days ago
Reply to  Mr. Frick

The built-in picnic table included on 1st and 2nd-gen CR-V’s could certainly be used for that purpose.

LMCorvairFan
LMCorvairFan
18 days ago

These days, it would probably be a hit on YouTube.

Saul Goodman
Saul Goodman
18 days ago

Wait, where do I apply to be a pacifier? Do they de-escalate wars or something?

Also, what does he play with now? Did he get fired from being a pacifier? Too many questions. Too much Honda advertisement lore.

Collegiate Autodidact
Collegiate Autodidact
18 days ago

Ha, maybe a reference to the 1954 children’s book The Giant by William Pène du Bois (best known for his 1947 Newbery Medal winning book The Twenty-One Balloons)? It’s a charming story about a child with such a “perfect digestive system” that for every pound of food he eats he gains a pound of mass so by the age of eight he’s big enough to play with full-size cars and trucks as if they were toy diecast model cars. However, it’d follow that he wouldn’t need to use a chamberpot as shown in that Honda ad since he didn’t produce any waste… Memorably, the scientists and doctors examining the child has him smoking a giant pipe on account of how tobacco would supposedly stunt one’s growth if one started smoking in childhood.
Anyway, some American books are indeed unexpectedly popular in Germany, like with the Three Investigators series from the 1960s and 70s which was a series of children’s/YA mysteries about a team of three (natch) young teenagers based in Los Angeles solving weird and inexplicable cases with titles ranging from The Secret of Terror Castle to The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy to The Mystery of the Coughing Dragon, etc; Germans liked that series so much it became something of a franchise in Germany with films, audioplays, and graphic novels as well as new books not published in the US.

Last edited 18 days ago by Collegiate Autodidact
Captain Muppet
Captain Muppet
18 days ago

I’ve got a stack of “Three Investigators” books in the corner of my office as part of a waist-high pile of old paperbacks I need to make shelving for. I’ve no idea how I was first exposed to them in pre-internet rural England, but once I started it apparently took thirty of them for me to get bored.

I re-read them all during Covid, they are not great. I don’t know why I’ve kept them.

Collegiate Autodidact
Collegiate Autodidact
18 days ago
Reply to  Captain Muppet

You must just have later books or the rebooted series from the 80s/90s, those do not hold a candle to the early ones. The original ones from the 60s and 70s are a lot of fun to read and highly enjoyable and actually hold up quite well in terms of showing the zeitgeist of life in non-Hollywood Los Angeles even though the early books in the first series had introductions ostensibly by Alfred Hitchcock.

Captain Muppet
Captain Muppet
18 days ago

It’s books 1-30 that I have.

Maybe I’d enjoy them more if I were American. Or if I weren’t so focused on working out the science-based explanation for whatever mystery it is they are solving.

I threw out all my Biggles books and kept these, so I must have liked these more.

Uncle Cholmondeley
Uncle Cholmondeley
18 days ago

The Coughing Dragon! I read a bunch of these books that were in my school library. The titles I read always ended with the Three Investigators explaining to Alfred Hitchcock how they solved the mystery. Autopian tie-in: this one involved the necessity of double-clutching when driving a diesel.

AlterId
AlterId
18 days ago

It’s a charming story about a child with such a “perfect digestive system” that for every pound of food he eats he gains a pound of mass…

No surprise that the Germans would be charmed and pleased by the story of a child with an efficient and well-engineered gastrointestinal tract.

Last edited 18 days ago by AlterId
Captain Muppet
Captain Muppet
18 days ago
Reply to  AlterId

No shit.

Dead Elvis, Inc.
Dead Elvis, Inc.
18 days ago
Reply to  Captain Muppet

vs our current reality, which seems like mostly shit.

Geoff Buchholz
Geoff Buchholz
18 days ago

It’s also an oddly old-looking baby. Like, why does Charles Durning have a pacifier?

Christocyclist
Christocyclist
18 days ago

Just commenting on how much I loved those first gen Civics when they came out. Still look good today.

Uncle Cholmondeley
Uncle Cholmondeley
18 days ago
Reply to  Christocyclist

Me, too! They look friendly and happy and just darn cute. Someone had a yellow one that worked at the commuter university near where I lived as a small boy, and I decided that when I was 16 I would buy one just like it. At 5, I didn’t know the word Civic, so I called it a “See Eye Vee Eye See”.

Double Wide Harvey Park
Double Wide Harvey Park
17 days ago
Reply to  Christocyclist

The first gen Prelude was equally great looking. There was a family resemblance. It came in a copper orange that was primo.

Christocyclist
Christocyclist
17 days ago

Yes! Such a great looking vehicle. Since we’re talking the 70s get me a first gen Scirocco and I’ll be happy!

Timbales
Timbales
18 days ago

Can You Sell Hondas With Pooping Babies?

That’s an option I’d probably avoid, but it probably would come bundled in a trim level.

Jesus Chrysler drives a Dodge
Jesus Chrysler drives a Dodge
18 days ago
Reply to  Timbales

Yes, that comes standard on the EX-crement.

Freelivin2713
Freelivin2713
17 days ago
Reply to  Timbales

I thought they were talking about the salespeople…

Sid Bridge
Sid Bridge
18 days ago

It makes me a little sad to see that poor Citroen tied to that tree and not allowed to roam the countryside.

StillNotATony
StillNotATony
18 days ago

1980 was not far removed from the 70’s, when avocado green, harvest gold, and various shades of M&M brown flourished.

And all those colors are present in baby poop.

Is this the connection the ad is going for? I dunno, but the German sense of humor can be pretty inscrutable to me.

Tim Cougar
Tim Cougar
18 days ago
Reply to  StillNotATony

“Baby poop” are exactly the words my mom uses when the describing the color of her old Cutlass.

David W Alderman
David W Alderman
18 days ago
Reply to  Tim Cougar

They should make this an official GM color.

32
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x