Let’s Take A Moment To Remember How Great The Honda Del Sol Beach Towel Commercial Was

Remember the Honda Del Sol? While I’m sure you do, I feel like most of the general population, addled and distracted as they are with their HAM radios and kaleidoscopes, likely have forgotten about this most unusual of Civics. Well, sometimes it was called a Civic; sometimes it was just a Del Sol, sometimes a CRX Del Sol. It contained multitudes, you see. But I think what many people may remember about this car was a really clever commercial that was made for it. About a towel. Sort of.

The Del Sol was actually Honda’s first open-topped car that was officially sold in America. The S500 roadster three decades before it, sure, but that was never officially sold here, even if plenty snuck in. The Del Sol wasn’t a convertible, but more of a targa-top kind of thing, with a removable roof panel that fit into a slot in the trunk lid.

As the name suggests, the whole deal with this car was to allow for the roof to be off and the sun, that giant ball of burning hydrogen 93 million miles away, to have access to your person while inside the car. Why don’t people pray to the sun more, like Akhenaten was trying to get us to do? It’s literally the source of all life, and it can burn you from all those millions of miles away!

Anyway, Honda was going to advertise these cars in a very sun-heavy way, as you can imagine, and that means the beach, even though, and I’ve checked this out, the sun does appear in other places, like loading areas behind supermarkets or gravel lots. They did make one ad, deceptive in its simplicity, that is a genuinely elegant way to express the whole point of the car:

I know that’s not a great copy of the ad – it looks like it was copied right from a VHS tape, which I suppose I kind of like – but you get the idea. The ad, made in 1993 by Rubin Postaer and Associates (RPA), the ad did not use any CGI which was just starting to become available at the time, but was prohibitively expensive. This was all done with camera tricks and clever editing.

I’ve seen online references to wind machines used to blow sand to hide the cut between towel and real car, but I just don’t see much blowing sand in that commercial? The truth is even better, if you ask me, because it’s just a production team doing their jobs really, really well.

These guys break it down nicely:

So, they shot the overhead with the real car first, then used that image as a projection to map the towel’s car exactly to where the real car would be, so the transition between flat towel car and real car would be seamless. And they were clever by having that kid chase the ball across the hood of the towel-car while the transition was happening with the rest of the car; I’m guessing they transitioned from the windshield up while the kid was running, then did the hood when he was gone?

My only real qualm with the ad is that I think driving off a towel on sand would just make a mess and grind that towel into the beach or maybe even wrap around the front wheels? Still, I can suspend my disbelief for that.

Overall, it’s just an absolute triumph of illusion! I’m gonna go buy a new Del Sol right now!

Top graphic image: Honda