You know how sometimes you wake up with a question that’s already lodged in your head? Like it was placed there by some unseen cosmic force, because that question is deeply important? Sure you do. This morning this happened to me, and that question was What Is The Least Appetizing Picnic Ever Featured in a Car Brochure? You’d think this would be the sort of question that would take a lifetime to answer, but, incredibly, I think I have somehow managed to find it right away. In a 1970 Mercury brochure.
I suspect some manner of otherworldly forces conspired to guide me to this brochure; there’s really no other reasonable explanation that accounts for how perfectly unappetizing this picnic looks in that photograph. It’s too perfect, and the odds of just finding it by chance seem astronomical. Some other powers are at play here. There must be a reason we needed to see this.
The brochure the Least Appetizing Picnic is in is an interesting one, a 1970 Mercury brochure that seems to be focused on selling wagons to men, real men, like the one one puckishly peering out of this zero:
The brochure is filled with pictures of handsome mercury wagons, like this Marquis:
The brochure also features some non-car pictures that seem to feature what early 1970s concepts of cultured, erudite masculinity would entail, like models of tall sailing vessels:
I feel like the phrase “advent of steam” is one of those that never fails to draw me into something painfully within my old man demographic. Also, were “shallow-draft lumber carriers” of the Great Lakes such a widespread interest back in the late ’60s and early ’70s?
The Meteor wasn’t as fancy as the Marquis, but it showed its “headlamp theme” unashamedly and, you know, ushered in that look of action. It was also paired with this saddle:
Yes, model ships and saddles! Perfect for the man’s man that wore a sportcoat made out of prime-rib steaks stitched together with bailing wire and smoked rolled-leather cigars filled with thinly-sliced prosciutto and Turkish tobacco.
Okay, one more wagon to clear your mind’s palette, and then let’s see this picnic:
Wow. I know that this is very fancy food – Chef Ellsworth of Sheraton Universal isn’t going to throw together some garbage. There’s a Linzer torte, ribs, chicken, some fruit, skewers jammed into carcasses, and it’s all just plopped down there in the tall grass.
Maybe it’s the old color-faded photography, maybe it’s the fact it’s just on the ground there, likely swarming with ants and other hungry insects, maybe its the thought of trying to deal with all those bones and skewers, I can’t put my finger on just one thing, but as an overall image, this picnic is wildly unappetizing.
Imagine showing up at a picnic and seeing this and being told “okay everybody – dig in!” and then just standing there, not seeing any sort of plate or utensils or anything, and just thinking “how?”
There’s certainly been other unappealing picnics in the brochure world; remember this sullen-looking one?
That one isn’t great. But there’s plenty far more appealing ones out there, too:
… and even Mercury figured out how to make picnics look less horrifying later, in this Sable brochure:
That one isn’t amazing – it’s mostly just bread and fruit – but it is definitely less horrifying than the fancy mess in the grass up there.
Am I being unfair, here? Is this just my lack of refinement showing? I’m not sure.
What I can say is that I do really appreciate all of the options Mercury offered for the back halves of their wagons:
Two different arrangements of jump seats at the rear, and that amazing two-way tailgate. Why aren’t those a thing anymore?
I dunno – the picnic doesn’t look all that bad to me. But the picture of the “real man”? Yeesh! Looks like the kind of guy who catches your eye in the mirror behind the bar and then says, “What the hell you lookin’ at, chief?”
“New parking and side marker lights usher in the look of action for the 70’s.”
There’s no way that Torch didn’t cream his shorts after reading that one.
Why were old color photos so…off? Especially the ones reproduced in print ads. Was it that old color film didn’t have accurate ways to represent color? Was it the ink that was used to print? Maybe it’s just my fairly young age, but even into the early 2000s I’ve found that color photos didn’t look quite right, and around that time digital photography took off, and that’s when things started to look more correct to me. This picnic looks unappetizing to me because of the lighting, the film/print grain, and especially the colors, which manage to make everything look like plastic. Funny enough, old illustrated print ads don’t seem nearly as bad to me in terms of color reproduction.
Photography and printing were just not that great back then. It was the available technology that makes everything look off. And they aged even worse.
were “shallow-draft lumber carriers” of the Great Lakes such a widespread interest back in the late ’60s and early ’70s
I’ll point you to the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald as Exhibit A for Great Lakes maritime history being an interest in the 70s.
Looking at how that later picnic from the Sable brochure is clearly staged in the back of the wagon, I wonder if someone who was around in 1970 dramatically smacked their forehead and said WHY DIDN’T WE THINK OF THAT!?!
Someone who was with L-M’s ad department all that time would’ve been there through the wild Smooth-Ride-Demonstration years – the jeweler cutting a diamond! The little girl doing penmanship in the wayback of a wagon! And the crashing end SNL brought to it with the rabbi doing a bris!
(Was that your bris, Jason? I still think it has to have been.)
The Honda Ridgeline is keeping the two-way “tailgate” alive to this very day! (Similar, just without a glass panel)
By the standards of 70s food, it’s not really that bad. There’s no weird tuna and pineapple constructs, or roasted bananas with whipped cream and ham. Not even any terrifying, folk-horror adjacent faces made of food for the kids. TBH, ‘food, but on the ground, no cutlery’ is pretty tame for the era.
Surprised there is no mention here that this is a Canadian brochure. The Meteor was not sold in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_(automobile)
By that point the Meteor Rideau 500 was identical to the US Mercury Monterey
The Old Car Manual Project Brochure Collection
I came here to say that is not a Mercury Brochure it is a Canadian Mercury Brochure. To be fair it is just the US Brochure with a few things changed to protect the guilty. However this isn’t the first time Torch has used Canadian versions w/o mentioning it or without knowing it.
Question for folks that are old enough to actually remember the early 70’s (I’m an 82 model) – were all the colors in the entire world actually muted and muddy like that (including the human beings) or is that an artifact of the film quality / developing process / some odd fetish of a chemist deep within the bowels of Kodak at the time?
Both
Photography and film processing was not the issue. What you’re seeing is the limitations in the printing process..
Also, I think that with the age of the brochure, it looks like the C has faded more than the Y and M, and the K is still at 100%. Along with maybe the printing overly favored the blacks in the first place.
Actually the world, including all of us that occupied reality, was black & white prior to 1980. Color had to be added by artists using their interpretation of events which is why you see stylistic changes through the ages where the 60s gave us bright and cheerful colors and the 70s brought the more muted earth tones to match the mood and trends toward more organic styles and choices.
Once we hit the 80s color exploded on the scene for reasons that are still unknown.
I agree, the 70s environmental movement manifested in the earth tones pushing aside the previous bright psychedelia influence. To then be replaced by the teal and magenta and neon and video games 80s.
“The cover lets you know what you’re in for: brown times to come, folks.”
I love this takedown of the 1973 Sears catalog so much:
https://lileks.com/70s/sears1973/index.html
73 model here.
Yes, everything was muted and muddy.
Remember everyone smoked back then and the EPA was just getting started.
And the fashion was hideous color combinations.
Staging a picnic photo with no people in it weirds me out. What happened to the people? Did they get raptured away? Beamed up by aliens? Or maybe the picnic is bait, and some fiend is waiting for the first sucker to try and take a bite out of that chicken.
Same thing?
COTD
That’s the price we had to pay as a society. Car companies made wagons but we had to eat over-saturated and glistening food in exchange.
The covenant was broken, wagons are gone and food turned beige.
I think the two-way tailgates on wagons (and where they would have ended up, crossovers) died off because of almost certainly costs, but also possibly water intrusion and corrosion issues from bad window seals. When I was growing up, we had an ’86 Grand Marquis wagon with the inward-facing seats in back (which were not at all roomy) and the two-way tailgate. We were afraid to use it in the fold-down way because of getting the door card dirty, or the window mechanism failing, and the latch was very stiff, so we always used it in the swing-open way. Which did make loading and unloading a bit of an easier reach.
But still, it’s probably the fault of cost-cutting.
Dad had an ’85 Colony Park, doubt we used the fold down feature more than a handful of times. Agree with the latch stiffness, and the window was slow and sketch.
A lot of those tailgate window mechanisms in American cars back then were sketchy as hell. We had a K5 blazer, and every time we had to put the window up or down, it was always an exercise in breath-holding to see if this was the time the regulator would break. And it was the manual one, not the electric, iirc.
So let me get this straight, as you read your Manly Mercury Wagon brochure, the important car information was interspersed with exhibits from the Maritime/Equestrian/Small Arms Museum of Waukeshoobeedoo, Michigan? Wild.
Also wild, Country Squire Guy grinding his white-panted knee into the grass.
Some photographer’s assistant spend an hour trying to stage that photo, 55 minutes of that was trying to get the wine glasses to not fall over.
“Imagine showing up at a picnic and seeing this and being told “okay everybody – dig in!” and then just standing there, not seeing any sort of plate or utensils or anything, and just thinking “how?”
Ask the ants.
Man, what was going ON with food in the 70s?
For a laugh check out the Gallery of Regrettable Food: https://lileks.com/institute/gallery/index.html
Well shit. There goes the rest of my morning.
The whole Lileks website is such a fantastic timesuck
I was going to post this!
Although the candyboots Weight Watchers Cards will always be my favorites:
https://www.candyboots.com/wwcards.html
I’m gonna guess that Chef Ellsworth’s food is actually pretty good, or he wouldn’t have got this ad gig in the first place.
When a gourmet chef makes BBQ, you should eat it.
The 70s were a sullen decade filled with plastic food.
May I interest you in a nice Jello salad with hot dog?
Remember the glitter covered plastic food in old ladies’ glass bowl centerpieces?
… and awesome prog rock
I would so rock that menacing ’70 Marquis.
Re: picnic – it is the oversaturated red and green color tones, that and the utter inappropriateness of setting.
“What is mommy doing daddy?”
“Getting drunk down by the river with a cucumber in her hand….”