Do you remember the Chevrolet Corsica, a car that somehow started life as a rental car? Seriously, it was first sold to fleet agencies in 1987 before being unleashed on the general public. Available with engines of some description pushing an amount of power to the front tires, this exceptionally whelming vehicle was certainly an improvement over the Citation, but that doesn’t seem like a difficult task to achieve. The Corsica isn’t a bad car, it’s just not particularly outstanding. This gave General Motors a problem, because how do you make a perfectly adequate car stand out? Well, you dial ‘M’ for marketing and hope that something good comes of it.
Unfortunately, the marketers dialed ‘A’ for aliens. Look, it was the 1980s, people were trying new things, sci-fi was big, and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” set a benchmark for cars and aliens, so let’s just see where this leads.
Ah, here we go, a Chevrolet Corsica cutting out while driving down a barren roadscape. Make all the reliability jokes you want, I know a Hollywood UFO abduction when I see one. Now, where’s that flying saucer full of little green men?
What the cinnamon toasted hell is that? I get that alien spacecraft probably wouldn’t all look like giant hubcaps, but come on. Really? Right in front of my bagel? Why does it have legs? Who signed off on this?
Anyway, the alien, um, craft descends and vacuums up the Corsica like lint off a rug while also spinning it around just to mess with the occupants. I presume that because it has legs, it can therefore kneel and just lower itself over the Corsica, but messing with earthlings just for fun is probably the most realistic part of this commercial.
Up in the ship, I’m guessing Wade Wilson would be a male model in these guys’ universe. Seriously, did The Flood from Halo get inspiration from these difficult to look at puppets or what? Also, can you imagine the conversation between the art director and the puppet maker to land on this look?
After a scaly hand caressing several square feet of impeccably beige sheetmetal, we land on this shot that I didn’t even edit. If this seems strangely seductive, get your mind out of the gutter, these aliens are talking about the car. The Impala necklace on the one dude should’ve said everything we needed to know — these extraterrestrial beings are Chevrolet, well, not exactly people in the traditional sense, but you get the gist.
It turns out that aliens don’t even need American currency to buy a Chevrolet Corsica because they can just clone an entire car including the people inside through some strange ritual involving a variant of jazz hands. And hey, what are all those bubbles in the background?
Oh, just a whole Chevrolet collection in bubbles, that’s all. Look, a pristine S-10 Blazer, a C4 Corvette, a C1 Corvette, and something that looks to be from the earlier part of the 20th century. Hey, we all have knowledge gaps. It’s a bit weird to think that aliens would come to our planet for the sole purpose of cloning Corsicas and Cavaliers, but it seems more productive than probing.
Once the cloning is over, the Chevrolet Corsica gets teleported back onto the road, which means the aliens were definitely just screwing with the occupants on the way up. As with every UFO cliché, the electronics work again, the car starts, and the family takes off down the road, singing a merry tune. Were their memories wiped or something because I don’t think I’d be the same after experiencing that.
It’s debatable exactly how this ad helped sell Corsicas, and my bet is something along the lines of it didn’t. However, I appreciate Chevrolet’s audacity to create a car commercial so thoroughly cursed in every imaginable way that it leaves viewers slack-jawed in amazement about the entire process, from conceptualization to distribution.
(Photo credits: Chevrolet, Meticulous Motors/YouTube)
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If I was stuck in that car singing “Row Your Boat” I think I would have asked the aliens to just to go ahead and kill me.
My first car was an $800 Corsica I bought from a mechanic I worked with, who got it on a sweet deal from the original owner. He regretted selling that car to me every day I drove it in.
It was a great little car. Mine had aftermarket cruise with broken buttons, so for awhile I used to just tap wires together to engage, which always made my passengers nervous. I eventually installed a toggle switch down and to my left of the seat which worked great.
It died when the fuel lines rusted out, and required dropping the tank with rusty straps and bolts, and it all would have turned into a David Tracy rust mound of curses and dead dreams, so that was the end of that car.
That was fucking great.
I am thankful for our alien overlords for occasionally wiping my memory, or else I would have remembered this commercial. Unfortunately, The Autopian is here to re-insert it. I feel violated.
Man did the Corsucka suck (apt nickname for a friend’s car). I knew multiple people with these when I was a teenager, and two of them were apparently equipped with the “magic interior disassembly” option, where trim and entire plastic panels just… sort of fell off whenever they felt like it. These were 5-10 year old examples mind you, this wasn’t 2015.
The Corsica might have been the most hated car among my peer group at the time, as it was both horribly cheap, and not fun at all. If you were going to be saddled with 90’s GM mediocrity, at least the classic Buick Century dead grandparent hand-me-down special was comfortable. The Corsica had nothing going for it.
Having known at least one Corsica owner and at least one Beretta owner, the alien physiology (specifically, a spine with four or five extra vertebrae) was a requirement for finding a natural seating position in these things. The Corsica owner, in particular, was not so-blessed and the driver’s seat swallowed his frame up to the tips of his shoulder blades.
Looks like someone’s gonna get an anal probe.
One more reason to avoid this piece of shit.
YMMV.
I just hope the aliens have better paint adhesion technology than Earth-GM was using at the time. One of my aunts had a silver Corsica for 10 years, by the end of which the paint was almost completely peeled off the primer.
Needs more “2.8 MULTI PORT FI” and “ABS” badges.
Wondering who the winking woman is?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbSLq3FEE9o
I was wondering if anyone else remembered Dinah Shore. “See the USA in a Chevrolet” was practically the national anthem for a while.
Thanks to Adam Sandler, I think there’s a legion of us who remember it as “the late Dinah Shor-ah”
I’ve never been able to figure out what placement the commercial was placed for when I’ve seen it pop up on the Internet before. It was too long for regular TV airtime, not quite info- or comparison-packed enough to be promo video they mailed out to customers on its own. Figured maybe an ad as part of the ‘previews’ at movie theaters, which would also make sense for the alien theme. But then a top comment on the Youtube page explained it was for a dealer convention, so that makes sense.
According to the top comment on Youtube it was the dealer intro. Blockquoted below from @danieltruly5847;
I did craft service on this! It was my very first job in Hollywood. It was shot at GMT Studios in Culver City as an industrial for that year’s Chevy dealer convention to introduce them to the Corsica (except for the last part of the car driving off which we shot out in the desert somewhere). I had a flat top at the time so Doug Trumball had me sit in an old-school Chevy convertible that was floating around once the aliens “collected” the Corsica (naturally you can’t see me). We dubbed the people who moved those big jaggedy things encircling the Corsica once it’s on the UFO “blade runners.” Mark Stetson from Boss worked on it, as did Matt Yuricich and Joe Viskocil did the physical FX. Thania St. John who went on to become a big TV writer was our production coordinator. And I made sure they had all the M & M’s they could eat!
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Yep that’s the one I read! I guess I could’ve just quoted it too. The boy in the back seat chimed in too there and elsewhere in the comments.
I can attest to the fact it was shown in movie theaters, as part of the previews. Tween me saw it at least twice that year. Even at that age, I couldn’t believe anyone (anything?) would put a Corsica in the same collection as a C1.
One of those cars in the bubbles is a 1932 Chevy sedan (I own one) and another is a 1937 sedan.
The overall premise of this piece is that people in the 80’s were idiots. Having lived through that era and several before it, I can assure you people weren’t idiots. The movie mentioned really was a big deal and I’m sure a lot of people were cool with the comparison.
Chill with the snarkiness.
Can you imagine how people 40 years from now will view current ads?
“Wait, it’s supposed to kinda remind you of some offroad vehicle, so why is it shown driving on the street, through the city? And jeeze it’s big.”
Yeah, there’s WAY more idiots/idiotic things these days…wish it was the 80’s…the best decade
People have been idiots on every decade, the 80’s were not an exemption.
Needs MOAR Mahk!
He’s the kid in the back seat. He’s about the right age.
Had a blue Corsica as a rental after a disfiguring accident in my Spectrum. I thought it was nicer than the Spectrum, ran well smooth nothing special but nothing negative. A2B AOK.
80’s Corsicas (and Berettas, too, really) were headed in the right direction but suffered from NVH and cheap, plasticky interiors. The ’92 re-work fixed all that and they were solid little cars for the rest of their run. Enough that car buyers would turn up their noses at the new Malibus in favor of Corsicas and Berettas on the lot when the model change came. (The incoming Malibu was a blobby, forgettable thing that screamed “rental special” louder than any Corsica that came before it.)
A standard V6 Corsica was basically Chevy’s attempt to re-create the Camry. Capable, unassuming, and comfortable. Too bad late 90s/early 2000s GM management tried so had to bury their cool 80s/90s concepts in the past and replace them with cars from the “disposable appliance” school of design.
You are 100s correct. The problem was cars were union made in union shops 100% and the unions didn’t care about shit. Let the dealer worry about it. Are you going to go all in on material when the union is all about drunken building and screw the American consumers because what are they going to do buy some cheap Jap shit? I’ll never trust a union label because it cost me thousands buying their crap built shit. They still can’t build Fiat quality let alone Toyota quality.
It’s a good point. The final Corsica design (shown in the top shot) def. had some pleasing sharpness which contrasted nicely with the de rigeur ’90s monochrome, unlike the new at the time Malibu.
I took my driver’s ed classes in a blue ’92.
Lucky you I took mine in my mom’s 1978 4 door Cadilac Fleetwood Brougham. I failed the 1st test.
Reminder: the 80’s were just so full of cocaine.
The most disturbing aspect is the cloned people trapped in their bubble cars.
That poor lobotomized looking lady winking at the kids from her red convertible is more off putting than the aliens.
Is she trapped there forever with nothing but a Dan Fogelberg cassette for entertainment?
Do the aliens feed them? Do they need food? Do they age?
Perhaps the aliens are indeed technologically advanced and they do this as a perverse punishment for terrible car choices?
Will the cloned children and husband continue to mindlessly sing that stupid song while mom slowly goes mad?
I have more questions than answers here.
What a hellscape.
How to serve humans. The aliens aren’t cloning cars they are cloning Lunchables.
Soylent Green is people.
That’s Dinah Shore, major Chevy pitch-person in the fifties and sixties.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhR8GZ_WWMM
Oh shit?…
So that’s where she disappeared to.
I drove one of these Corsicas for a few days, as a rental.
This is seriously WTF!? Just nuts.
For those who may not have ever had the displeasure of driving a Corsica or Beretta, they were utter junk. They were so bad you actually dreamed of having your Citation back. Seriously, Chevettes were better.
Well yeah…I mean RWD plus low weight means no how bad the Chevette was from a QC standpoint, it was a small-block swap from being a burnout-hero-death-machine. Can’t do that in a Corsica.
Many years ago in the mid-90’s when I lived in SF I met a very nice, tall, attractive guy – and we we arranged a date the following week.
He picked me up in a blue Corsica hatchback.
He was very kind and nice, but….
…I never saw him after that one date.
Because Corsica.
But it was the hatchback!! Those were even more rare than the Chevy Monte Carlo Aerocoupe. Surely that got him some points…
Opposing story: In the mid-90s, I took my girlfriend out on a date in a blue Corsica sedan. She liked the car, and we’re still married to this day. And still fondly remembers the Corsica.
Now, to be fair, it has to be the right Corsica. Mine was the little-known Z52 option with improved suspension tuning and higher output from the optional V-6 engine. Tachometer and full instruments same as used in the Beretta. Yes, the stereo was completely overhauled. Wonderful little sleeper of a car, and let’s give some credit — the Corsica body style was remarkably clean without being bland, especially the with the Z52 package’s slightly lower stance, alloy rims and beefier tires to fill the wheel wells out properly. It was actually a pretty little car with a nice wedge profile.
My wife, a number of years before she met me, had actually done car transportation and some car testing; she’d driven a variety of cars — some that lived up to their sporting aspirations and others that got by more on marketing and reputation than actual capability. She got her hands on that Corsica whenever she could, and genuinely liked it.
90s GM was a crazy thing; every so often it would quietly pop out a great version of an otherwise mediocre car. They did it with just about every car line at one time or another, often somewhat surprisingly with front-drive cars. But given that GM largely invented the high-powered front-wheel-drive car in the 1960’s with the Hy-Vo chain-driven Unitized Power Package, it’s probably not all that shocking.
Also, the 90s contemporary Cadillac Seville was more or less a scaled-up version of the Corsica’s proportions just with a bit of Cadillac’s sharp edges instead of the Corsica’s fuselage form. Likewise a front-drive car, just with a V8 to match its scale and a performance “STS” version was available. Yes, I parked the Corsica side-by-side with a Caddy; the similar proportioning was freaky. I’ve said it before, I really miss the quirky but industrial ’90s GM.
In fairness to GM, when the Chevy marketing got a hold of the car, they certainly found a way to market the car in such a way that you wouldn’t think of the car much.
I know there were extenuating circumstances here, but it seems like one thing you shouldn’t include in your car commercial is the driver losing control of the car.
So I can only guess they Chevy, Chevy, Astro, Astro space van lured the aliens to our planet. This could have worked so well a few years later as a tie-in with the X-Files.
Ahem – GM did eventually get the X-Files tie in, albeit with the secretly excellent Intrigue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldsmobile_Intrigue#In_popular_culture
So did Alien Mama want the car or the people? Maybe she was hungry and thought the Corsica was a snack dispenser.
A species with technology centuries ahead of ours and they want a Corsica? So much for intelligent life on that planet.
If the aliens were cloning a Corsica and using it to try and enhance their technology, that would explain why we haven’t seen them since.
Also, controversial take, but am I the only one who wanted to see a base model version of the Beretta that used the Corsica’s taillights? That would have looked pretty cool as a basic coupe.
No way! The Beretta taillights are Torch-level classics, whereas the Corsica’s were kinda ’80 spec. Though I will say this…the ribbing on the Corsica’s kinda replicated the internal effect on the Beretta’s, so maybe you’re not totally crazy. 😉
The better-looking ribbed Corsica taillights were part of the ’92 refresh, which also included a much better dashboard and controls, and better new interior door panels and grabs.
And the ribbed taillights originated on the Canada-only Pontiac Tempest (a badge-engineered Corsica.)
And they did do a fair job of keeping themselves at least partially clear of snow on the highway, pretty much as well as the ribbed Mercedes taillights of the day which were designed for that.