This Is One Of The Most Inadvertently Metal-Sounding Car Names: Cold Start

I’ve always been sort of fascinated by the Plymouth car model name “Fury.” It’s a very evocative name, and, unusually for car names, carries with it a lot of negative connotations, too. It’s anger, it’s wrath, it’s rage. Those emotions also have within them more positive connotations suggesting power and determination, and I suspect that’s what Chrysler’s naming brains-in-bubbling-tanks intended. When combined with “wagon,” as they are here in this 1975 brochure, the end result feels strangely, I don’t know, metal to me. Like you can imagine a Viking war chariot called a Fury Wagon pretty easily, right? That’s very much not what these cars really were, but it is a great name to say. Everyone in the Fury Wagon! Off we go, to conquer the Queen of Dairy!

This brochure is from a sort of low ebb for the Fury; in 1975 the full Malaise Era damp blanket was covering everything, and power was down, quality wasn’t great, handling was like shoving a mattress on four overripe cantaloupes down the street, all that.

But these were plush and opulent cars, in wagon form or coupé or sedan, in that deeply ’70s way! I mean, just look:

Look at how well those outfits match the car! This is a good example of the “pose” type of car brochure photo; often they strove to have people looking casual, pretending to be unobserved, and sometimes they just went for the stiffest, Sears Portrait Studio-type of stand and stare at the camera kind of posing. This brochure has both.

For example, here’s a less-posed shot, where the dashing couple is…emerging from the darkness of the forest? Where are they trudging out from, dressed like that, in what looks to be a dirt path in the wilderness? The hell is going on here?

If you look carefully at the Valiant (this brochure covered those, too) in the woods shot up there, you may notice some little chrome dealies on the fenders; these were turn indicator tell-tales, tiny little lights on the fenders you could look at to see if your signals were signaling. In this era Chrysler gave them a second job, or at least the driver’s side one: they made it into the “Fuel Pacer” warning light, which basically just came on if you stayed on the gas pedal too much.

It was a supremely half-ass approach to improving fuel economy, just a little light that went on when engine vacuum levels hit a certain point. I suspect it was almost universally ignored.

What you can’t ignore are the wonderful color options you had for your Fury or Gran Fury’s interiors. Look at that fresh-liver red, the mossiest of greens, the most butterscotchic of yellows, the blues, so indigoing or turquoised, and the earthy stripey goodness. Fantastic.

I also really like how showing tilting steering wheels always seemed to end up in these abstracted strange images that evoked the work of Italian Futurists, or paintings like Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase.

This description of the Gran Fury is amazing, too, because it seems to be saying that the size of the car looks like the size of the car?

Quick, what’s different in the middle and right images? This one took me a moment.

And finally, I miss the days when pretty much anything could be considered a viable tow vehicle. I think these things could pull between 2,000 and – if I’m reading this right – 7,000 pounds! What? What a world.