Oh, Lotus! So many incredible cars, cars built for the sheer joy of driving. There’s so much they had figured out, and then also so much that seems to have eluded them, like how to make brochures in the ’60s. I mean, they had the basic ideas right, but somehow things just ended up a little, I don’t know, weird. Like they were almost trying too hard, and sort of in the wrong ways? Let’s look at some of these.
There was a sort of formula to these brochures for ’60s era sports cars: at its most simple you’d get the car in some kind of interesting or exotic location, and you’d get an attractive woman in the picture, somehow. Sometimes there’d be a dude, too, a stand-in for the usually male target market of these cars.
Ideally, the context would all make at least some sort of sense, or suggest some kind of basic scenario: a day at the beach, an attempt to hanglide, a swing party at a llama farm, whatever. Lotus didn’t really seem to get the narrative part, and came up with stuff like this:
Okay, we have a very pretty 1974 Lotus Elan big in the foreground, parked on some damp-looking sandy ground, in front of a dark, craggy cave that looks like it’s hacked out of obsidian. Lurking in the background, pretty far in the background if we’re honest, is a woman in a poppy-orange dress lurking just in front of the inky blackness that is the dark recesses of that cave.
Sure, Lotus has they key elements: exotic location, the car, the woman, but they’re missing one key element: the viewer has to want to be there. And does anyone really want to be there? It looks cold and a little clammy, and I can’t say that woman is looking like she’s enjoying herself. Can we use the car to get the hell out of that cave? It’s probably filled with guano and there’s smelly things dripping everywhere.
This isn’t a good time. And, there’s nowhere to really drive that Elan! If they’re selling a lifestyle, I think they’ve just cornered the troll market.
Then again, based on Lotus’ other brochures, maybe they just weren’t always comfortable with people at all. Look at this Esprit brochure picture:
Car, foggy morning, grass. Good enough, everyone knock off early! Also, are the reverse lights on?
The way this brochure showed the interior is even weirder:
Absolutely amazing interiors on these, the colors, the shapes of the seats, that plaid– but did they just drop a photo on the asphalt and take a picture of a picture? Or was this done at the paste-up stage? And if so, why?
Here’s another scene from the ’74 Elan brochure. Again we have the fun location, the car, and a woman, but once again it’s a place where that car really doesn’t belong – nobody drives Elans through low tide at the beach. Even though the body is fiberglass, I feel like they still figured out a way to make it rust, and you can almost hear it doing so in this picture.
The woman is dressed like she’s about to meet an older gentleman for vodka and caviar and ennui at a fancy Moscow restaurant, but instead she’s uncomfortably reclining on the hood, with a fairly bored/nonplussed expression. Is this enticing? This scene feels like a prelude to the ride back where she spends the whole time asking you why the hell you thought this would be a good idea.
Also, in the inset pictures, even that dog looks eager to get away.
Eventually, Lotus figured out a workable angle, as you can see in this Elite brochure: rich people, doing rich people shit. Fancy garden party? Just park the car in the middle. Then make sure a woman in a big feather boa and a guy with a bow tie just one size down from clown-equipment grade are standing nearby and boom, you’re selling cars!
It’s that easy!
Lol I could see myself taking the picture of the Elan and yellow dress woman. I actually like the photo and the vibes.
The cave girl looks like an appeal to the Sawney Bean family.
“Vodka and caviar and ennui”… Torch, don’t ever change!
Reminded me of this quote.
“Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy’s Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day’s work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city’s reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.”
― P.G. Wodehouse , The Best of Wodehouse: An Anthology
The woman in yellow in the obsidian cave, is she the spectre of Lotus’s financial ruin, never far from view and always lurking in the background?
I’m pretty sure that woman dressed in black draped over that Elan is waiting for emergency services to drag her car out of the surf. She can’t sit in the seats because the interior is soaking wet and she doesn’t want to ruin her shoes in the watery sand!
I think the tarmac and seats pic was fair warning as to what would happen when the floor plan — often made out of plywood and held, more or less in place with a mixed lot of screws found in someone’s shed, fell out.
Buyers were warned to never lift the carpet in their lotus, or risk a sense of their money going to buy plywood floors.
The white Esprit with no people in the shot is actually pretty realistic. The driver has left the non-running car to go get help.
Dang, that picture of the Elan with that person emerging from the obsidian cave is actually pretty creepy. Reminiscent of the Japanese horror film The Ring.
Ad director: Did you get those pictures of the Elan at the ‘Ring?
Photographer: Sure did, boss, real fuckin creepy with the Ring just like you asked
Ad director: What
German horror film where the victims don’t correctly sort their recycling or return their pfand
To cite Joseph Conrad: „The horror! The horror!“
Both Elans are showing some pretty excessive ride height. You think Mink Babe would press the front end down a bit, but noooooo….
“Simplify, and then add lightness.” Then have Svetlana lay on the hood.
The red Elan brochure is awfully optimistic. That car doesn’t have enough room to carry your wife/mistress and your dog, you have to choose one or the other.
Looks like the dog was told to go in the trunk with the two suitcases, and she ain’t having it.
It’s a 2+2.
To the women in the long boas, do not ware them in the convertibles – Isadora D.
Hey cut orange dress lady some slack Torch. She just woke up from a 3 day psychedelic bender.
And no that is not where she remembered parking her car, but chromes and cocaine mixed together as we’ve learned from Rick James is a hell of a drug…
Nothing makes me want to be in 1970s England like a wet and dreary day at the beach…
In the ’74 Elan ad, I thought the woman was Elvira, Mistress of the Dark and the fur hat was her hair.
Also in that ad, the guy in the bottom inset photo looks like Charles Manson!
Furs On The Beach, the latest single from Phillip Glass.
1970s?
Might be him
The Elan on the beach brochure reminds me of one Zastava ad (also on the beach with a guy playing Bach on a cello because…classy?)
I believe those are [acting as] rear fog lights, which some British cars had.
Jeez, I think that I only just realized how pretty a hardtop Elan is.
The Esprit was one of my favorite Matchbox cars. That Elan is nice.
One just like it just sold on one of the auction sites for an ungodly amount.
007
The one with the orange dress is a trap. A trap I tell you. And I bet the driver of that Lotus knows it to by now.
Yep that Selkie will lure you into that sea cave and eat your soul.
Scottish fae broadening their portfolio to entrap car enthusiasts
I mean they got the general idea right – take a car to the beach, drape a beautiful woman over it. Unfortunately it was November and their budget seems to have been limited to Great Yarmouth rather than St. Tropez.
And the budget was so limited the photographer couldn’t afford a professional model, so he had to use his daughter, and she was none too happy about this, copping the usual attitude/drama.
Just round the Norfolk coast from Yarmouth is the lovely seaside village of California.
I say lovely, it’s grey and depressing for 300 days a year because it’s in England.
All looks normal to me, down to the bow ties. Our high school band uniforms had identical ‘three sizes too large’ velvet clip-on bow ties with the oh-so 70’s front ruffles and cumberbun to match.
Before senior band pictures me and the guys were pulling on each other’s bow ties and being generally disruptive. The teacher yelled at us to cool it, and then turned around to talk to the photographer. I took that moment to take one more attempt at grabbing my buddy’s tie, which resulted in his fist making solid contact with my nose.
My mother was so proud. My senior band picture features blood all over my shirt, my glasses askew, and the whole back section – including me – trying our best not to burst out laughing. My father called it ‘Alfred P Newman after two rounds’.
That guy’s bowtie truly is approaching clown-equipment grade! XD
You legitimately had me laughing out loud in the office with that one, Torch. Your articles should probably come with a warning label of some sort…
It’s from a lesser-known Stephen King work, The Tie. The two little triangles of fabric are about to pull inward toward the guy’s neck and begin squeezing.
That is a TAME bowtie by 70s standards.
The seventies were certainly a time for fashion.
I feel like we could have just left it there.
Make no mistake, they’ve made (and still make) fantastic cars with some innovative designs; they just don’t seem to really know how to BE an actual car company.
“My hands…
What am I supposed to do with my hands!?!”
It’s 2006. The Esprit has been out of production for four years. More importantly GM is about to pull the plug on the VX220/Speedster, leaving all the tooling for a Lotus designed chassis and it’s 2.0 turbo engine just laying around.
What Lotus should do is slap an Esprit-styled body on it, turn the boost up, fit tartan seats and sell it for double what people are paying for Exiges because it has their best badge on it. Finally an Esprit with a robust gearbox and some chassis stiffness. Sure, it’s not a V8, but nor was the Esprit GT3, that was just a 2.0 turbo too.
Instead, of course, they called it Europa and gave it the arse of a Proton and the face of one of those generic not-a-real-car cars from a TV insurance ad. Then failed to sell any at all for £30k.
It’s bad enough they misspell fiber as fibre, but to rearrange it to glass-fibre? I am expressing my faux ‘Murican outrage! /s
so funny!
Such cool photos. Those cars were so good looking back in the day. Also, I am old enough to remember the 1970’s but not old enough to be nostalgic about them. I hated the 1970s.
Bummer Dude! Guess you didn’t have pop up groovy concerts happening in your neighborhood, where you could peace out to the squares. I hung out with an older crowd, but could dig it. You know Bill&Teds was just a rehash of the mentality of “Be excellent to each other, and party on dudes!”
No I remember, poverty, crapy breaking down cars, closing steel mills, ugly uncomfortable clothes, everyone smoking, childhood boredom of pinochle clubs and bowling alleys, electric skillet meals, rampant divorces, and all the dark parts of the 1970s as a child.
That’s depressing. I’m not saying pop up get your groove on’s were happening All the time, but when they did, they went on for daze.
And people wonder why GenXers are the way that they are?
If you were old enough to be nostalgic, you would have a hard time time remembering.
For instance that time I somehow ended up at the diner Sunday morning wearing someone else’s shoes.