I usually think of the 25-year-or so period between roughly 1950 and 1975 as the Golden Age of car brochure illustration, globally. But that doesn’t mean photography wasn’t a huge force already, because of course it was. Photography is a powerful tool, and midcentury brochure designers were doing all sorts of interesting experiments with the medium, including ones that, in hindsight, make you wonder just what the flapjacks they were thinking. Like this 1964 Pontiac Tempest brochure.
This brochure came to my attention earlier this week when we were discussing the car testimony from My Cousin Vinny, which referenced a 1963 Pontiac Tempest. This ’64 Tempest is a very different car, losing all of the interesting technical stuff the bold ’63 had, like the rear-mounted transaxle and the flexible “rope drive” driveshaft, and maybe this return to conventionality is what sparked some of the, um, bold choices of the photography here.
Some of it I really like! Take the way the photographer pushed the pictures of the cars in their various colors into a monochromatic space, which makes things look sort of surreal and dramatic:
I like that effect a lot. I’m guessing instead of just backgrounds, lens filters were used? Nobody was just pulling these into Photoshop and ⌘-Uing the Hue/Saturation palette back in 1964, after all. This took physical effort.
The monochromatic wash was used in other places in the brochure, sometimes maybe pushed a bit too far:
It’s almost hard to read that cat, as scarlet-blasted as they are:
They look pretty damn comfortable there, at least. And, the low-mounted vacuum gauge in front of the shifter is interesting; that’s one of those gauges that carmakers just seemed to thrown in on a whim, sometimes labeled as a crude “fuel economy” gauge.
Still, I think there were some good ideas at play, but they maybe got a little misguided. Look at this:
What’s going on here, exactly? They want to convey the idea that there’s a lot of choices to be made here, and that’s a good thing. An embarrassment of riches kind of situation, and the copy even says “pleasant choosing.” So why light it so dramatically and ominously? Why does that kid look so serious and grim? Isn’t this candy-related situation an opportunity to smile? This doesn’t convey “pleasant choosing” as much as it suggests a last treat before going back in The Box.
I do love those fruit-slice gummy dealies, though. They’re my favorite part of Passover. I mean, other than not being a slave in Egypt or whatever.
Some of the brochure gets back on track, like this interesting way to show that baby-blue inline-six, stacked atop cubes with black-and-white pictures showing some of the charming bits of childhood. The idea that the childhood imagery is supporting the engine as opposed to the other way around is a strange choice, but perhaps it makes sense on some level.
Also, that stuffed tiger in the middle-top box kind of reminds me of how Hobbes was shown when perceived as a stuffed tiger in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes.
But don’t worry, things get a little weirder. For example, real people are used in the brochure, like on this page:
…but then this decision was made:
Why the mannequins? And, even weirder, why all the mannequins except for the (I assume) mom there, who is just creepily made up to look like a mannequin? Being placed into position by that cigar-chomping dude? What are they getting at here?
Also, nice to see the use of the term “Morrokide” here, which was one of GM’s names for Naugahide, to keep people from lamenting at the fate of those poor naugas.
Let’s get to the perhaps strangest choice now, the one that would likely be met with some genuine outrage today, because you know how people get about naked kids in car advertising:
So, yeah, we have a nice collapsing Tower of Babel of Blocks and then, for some reason, a naked kid eating ice cream on the car seat. Now, I don’t think for a second there was any impure intent going on here, and the bits you’d want hidden are hidden. I think it was just seen as “cute” at the time, but well, let’s just say it didn’t age that well.
I guess the message is that the seats are easy to clean?
So many strange choices made here. Did all of this misguided art-school mess get people to buy Tempests? Maybe?
that kid looking dejected at a pile of candy reminds me of poor Charlie Bucket watching the candy store kids through the window while they pig out and sing at how picky they could be.
My poor Millennial-addled brain hears (or I guess reads) the word “Naugahyde” and can only think of Plucky Duck in Tiny Toons getting well out of the car at Happy World Land and saying “Darn shticky Naugahyde…!”
Oh, television. How quaint you used to be. At least this nonsensical print ad doesn’t make me worried that random women will try to eat me, as the end of this Tempest ad does.
For me, it’s Warren Zevon:
“I loaded up their furniture
And moved it to Spokane
Where I auctioned off every last
Naugahyde divan!”
That Tempest ad with the rebadged Corsica kind of broke my brain until I realized it must be Canadian.
Reminds me of the Kroehler Furniture factory in Naperville (now condos). They used to have toy “naugas”. IIRC those were given away to those who bought Naugahyde sofas. Believe it or not, there is a Nauga online shop.
I can bet you the little dude’s just lettin’ loose all over that seat and they didn’t realize until the cameraman wondered what that acrid urea smell was. On the upside the interior’s already gold.
Kid standing on the blue seat with the steering wheel has the vibe of “Dad wasn’t kidding, this is harder after a few whiskey-sours”.
Well that’s easily the most horrifying, disturbing, unsettling thing I’ve ever seen on this site. That ice cream isn’t staying in the cone much longer, and I don’t care how easy they say it is to clean the seats, the inevitable sour milk smell is going to attach itself to something.
I like the chocolate gold foil wrapped coins. I’m not Jewish, but my buddy who is doesn’t eat chocolate so he always passes those along to me and I look forward to them.
Fruit slices, really? Chocolate matzoh or GTFO!
Jason I would have taken you for a gefilte fish enthusiast.
Clams… he’s all about the clams.
Thanks to General Motors and it’s prolific use of Naugahyde over several decades, the nauga is now officially extinct.
Way to go, GM!
The same thing happened to the Fellatio Monkeys from which Velour was harvested from…
Gawd I actually miss Velour seats. I tend to pick quality? fabric over leather/pleather given a choice.
Velour came from the velour bird (also extinct). The Fellatio monkeys were hunted to extinction during the first big Latin music craze to use their teeth in maracas.
So, why wasn’t THIS all brought up in the trial??
Oh yeah, ’63 Tempest.
The guy with the cigar is the salesman. The kid isn’t smiling looking at the candy because he was told he couldn’t have any, but he was hoping grandma would show up because you know grandma’s will let you. Some pretty creepy stuff there. I’ll take a 64 GTO please!
That kid is way too old to be naked in a photo. And he was way too old back then, too, but nobody was paying attention.
ROFL – the naked baby thing to show how easy it was to clean is actually pretty on-point in the days before kids being in space capsules inside a car. I can DEFINITELY remember by baby brother having a massive diaper blowout all over the back seat of Stepfather’s Grand-Prix. Eeew. Lipstick red leather, so it must have cleaned up fairly easily.
Dad claims I blew both ends all over the backseat of his brand new ’77 Cutlass Supreme – sorry, I was probably 18 months old or so.
Baby brother was about the same age, so I was 11 or 12. He’s nine years younger than I am.
Old enough to know better!
Still too young to care! I bet I cried like a banshee though.
Driving back from a weekend trip, probably carsick and physically sick.
Ha. And, to be clear, that was sarcasm about a 1.5 yr old being old enough to not get sick.
Oh, I know… Had plenty of the same with my daughter. I still carry a pack of Huggies wipes in each car (she’s 20 now).
I was looking to see if someone else posted this. My first thought was that the kid was naked for easy clean up, echoing the ad copy about the easy-clean seats. Back then, people weren’t running around in fear of pedos (which is partly how we got to the point of ubiquity of that fear).
We mostly got that fear once there was a platform available to broadcast it to the world. Back when the “news” was a daily paper and half hour of local news a night, that sort of thing was only known to the immediate victim and family (if they came forward at all). While in some ways bringing it into the open is good (certainly good for the victims!), I don’t think the result is good for society as a whole. You only need to hear so much bad news on a daily basis, and humans being humans, too much of the news is “if it bleeds it leads”. My $.02.
I agree. As usual, there should be a sensible balance, but humans aren’t sensible, so they prefer to swing the pendulum from one extreme to the other. I grew up in the ’80s and we had stranger danger. I turned down a ride in a Pantera because of it and my friend was even with me if anything had happened. I realized I was an idiot on the bike ride home. A lot of our warnings were about creepy clowns and people in vans handing out candy or stamps that were supposedly laced with a drug. So, instead of warning us about the potential of people we knew, say our school art teacher, we largely had these cartoon villains in our heads. I was always suspicious, as was my mother, so the art teacher didn’t get me, he got my friend who grew up in a functional family and didn’t listen to my warning that there was something off about the guy. Another similarly suspicious friend also trusted his gut, though he actually went to the guy’s house with my victim friend before making an excuse and bugging out. Score two for dysfunctional families, I guess. Anyway, now it seems like anyone who so much as talks to a kid that isn’t their own even under appropriate circumstances is looked at as a potential criminal. Still being a suspicious person, I can’t say I don’t have the same instinct, but I should be more of an outlier as I am with most things.
That’s terrible. I was lucky to never have any sort of experience like that, but I know people who did as well. Priests…
I guess I am just old enough to not have gotten the paranoia beat into me, because I am not, at all. Though I like to think I am a realist. Old enough to have had “duck and cover” drills in early years of school though (grade 1-3 I lived on an Air Force Base though). Which I suppose are better than “active shooter” drills. Sigh. What a messed era we have created in this country.
I always kind of expected this country to descend into fascism. I didn’t expect the techno-horror, but I’m just a suspicious misanthrope, not the Amazing Criswell (as I typed that, it occurred to me that Criswell was played by comic actor and convicted pedo, Jeffrey Jones in Ed Wood). What a world, what a world (as spoken by Margaret Hamilton who played Wizard of Oz’s main villain and who, by any account I’ve seen, was an advocate of children and animals).
Defying stereotype, the pedo teacher of my Catholic elementary school was a civilian, not one of the clergy. They eventually made him principal. He died of cancer a while back. AFAIK, he was never publicly accused and I have no proof, but there’s no sneaking past the scale of Anubis.
The one thing that seems to be a constant is this country is that the pendulum always swings back the other way. Thankfully, Trump is a doddering old man in very much failing health, and there is no heir apparent with his snake oil salesman charisma. And people are wising up to his bullshit. One of the best hopes for that just got shot. Shady Vance sure as hell isn’t it. I very much predict the worst of MAGA dies with Trump.
Yeah, Vance definitely doesn’t have whatever weirdo charisma it is that Captain Diapers has. I hope that it still matters by the time he’s shit his last McFish sandwich.
https://images-stag.jazelc.com/uploads/theautopian-m2en/cs_tempest_candy.jpg
Oh man, my fat ass loved those candy fruit slices when I was a kid.
The photo of the cat suggests the Tempest is a …
Kitty magnet?
Feline magnet?
I’m blown away by the sheer amount of Passover-compliant fruit-slice candies are in that jar. Bought a box lately? You get nine of them. I still remember when each section in the box had three candies, then it went down to two, then one. To fill that jar today, you’d have to buy every box in two different store’s kosher sections. That’s like a $150 jar of candy.
Oh, and I assume like me you bit off and enjoyed the “rind” part first?
I remember those candies as a child. Yes, I think I ate the rind first too, probably have not had one in 35+ years. Had no idea they were a Passover thing.
My great-grandmother always had huge jars of those candies. But not being Jewish, I assume they are lots cheaper when not Certified Kosher.
I had no idea they were associated with Passover. What is the history of that?
I ate the rind first too.
Only so many foods can be made to be k-for-p (kosher for Passover). Deserts are especially tough, especially if you’re trying to make them appealing to a kid. For pre-packaged stuff, you’re looking at either these or canned macaroons (and sure gold coins and crappy jelly beans etc.). My guess is, in a world before a million kinds of candy, these things were a real novelty. Maybe even seasonal. So maybe a Jewish response to whatever treats were popular around Easter in the 1950’s.
Pittsburgh has a large Jewish community and I definitely had these as a kid. Never made the connection with the chocolate coins though….
This was the 70s and 80s. Though she and my great-grandfather made it to 1995, in their 90s. Like my grandparents, died within months of each other.
Kosher food is interesting to me. One of my college best friends converted to marry into a pretty Orthodox family, eventually became a kosher chef, and is about to become a Rabbi. So I know a little bit about it through him, but not a lot. From a food safety perspective, the Jews were incredibly smart before their time when all the rules originated.
It’s quite astonishing the work that was produced by coked-up ad men back in that time. Then again, this was also the era when vacuum cleaners were advertised in magazines as “a great gift for the modern house wife”.
Ehh, ’64 so more likely (a lot of) booze than coke. Full on Mad Men.
Coke was definitely a thing in the bigger cities in the 60s.
They should have had a guy dressed as Shakespeare in an ad for this car
““We are such stuff as dreams are made of”
so…I was THAT naked baby in the ad.
JK, although I could have been
IIRC the naked baby on the cover of ‘Nevermind’ successfully sued.
At least this kid doesn’t have his dick hanging out.
I have an adorable (tasteful, no genitalia on display) naked baby picture of my baby brother that I successfully embarrassed the hell out of him with when he was a teen. Revenge is sweet, he was, and still is, such a little asshole.
Ahh – let the hate flow. I have a nearly 6 yr old younger brother and know this all too well. At 13 he just needed taken into the backyard and beaten up. I was away at college at that time, came home for winter break and his behavior towards mom had me seeing red.
Oh, you have no idea. Lots of history from the time the little shit could crawl. After a big family blowup over selling our mother’s house that he and his deadbeat wife were living in rent-free, they no longer talk to my mother or myself. To which I say “good”. Neither of us need their bullshit in our lives. The umbilical cord finally got well and truly cut, and Mom got some counselling she badly needed.
I have long said I love my baby brother, and I do when he’s not being an asshole, but he’s an asshole about 99% of the time. Takes after his father, who was also an asshole 99% of the time.
Mine turned out more than OK, unfortunately he lives with his family most of the way across the US and visits are rare. We are both successful in our careers and fully independent with families of our own. I still live within an hour of mom and dad.
That’s excellent! My mother followed me to Florida (hence the sale of her house), so I am 10 minutes from her. Brother still lives in Maine. I’m actually kind of surprised I have never run into him anywhere when I’ve been there in the summer, it’s a small place.
I’m actually kind of proud of him from a distance. After FINALLY getting booted out of the nest, he is doing just fine supporting himself and his wife. I still have his Credit Karma login from when I was helping them get their financial act together, so I keep tabs on him a bit. And we still talk to his kid, who somewhat still talks to him.
I never had to physically beat mine up, but I definitely let him have it verbally in the car one day while he was going through his angsty teenager phase. I had mixed feelings about it afterward, but I actually think it did some good. Shortly thereafter he started treating our whole family a lot better, and to this day we get along well.
I didn’t beat him up, but wanted to. At his age dad gave me a backhand to the face that woke me up. He NEVER touched us.
Uncanny valley, as a late Gen-X this sort of art style seems oddly familiar from my childhood, yet so far removed from my adult reality. Odd.
The 2 door is a good looking car. Has the perfect amount of prestige gap. Had those same wooden blocks growing up in the late 70’s early 80’s.
those blocks seem to transcend time. I had them, my kid had them. They’ll be floating in the void long after the heat death of the universe.
I mean, sure, lots of people will claim that their seat materials are “soft as a baby’s tuchus” or whatever, but only Pontiac had the courage to actually put it in a picture!
Jason has brewed quite the Tempest in a teapot this morning.
Did anyone catch the hidden message in the stack of blocks?
All I’m seeing is EM HTIW KLAW ERIF
Shh! It’s a SECRET!
Per an open ai scan of the picture:
“I checked the blocks with OCR, and while it picked up many random letters and fragments like “ID,” “NSA,” “SS,” “F ME,” “MR EA,” and so on, there doesn’t seem to be a clear, intentional hidden message spelled out.
It looks like the blocks are mostly arranged randomly, just to visually show a huge pile representing “cubic inches” (as the caption says). Any readable bits (like “NSA” or “MR EA”) seem more like coincidental arrangements rather than purposeful words.”
Yeah, that’s what THEY want you to think.
I mean, who doesn’t get naked and eat icecream in their car?
Who else is up for a good time?
Been doing that ever since I was a boy….
I was hot and I was hungry!
Torch you crack me the fuck up! Thanks for that