You know this look. I know you do. You’ve seen it innumerable times in innamable places. I’m also just now realizing that “innumerable” does not have an equivalent “innamable” equivalent, and “unnamable” is not really what I’m going for here. The point is this look – the intense deep-purple-to-burning-citrus-orange sunset, the mountains, the moon, the stars, the flat, reflective ground – all of that is such a wonderful and strange ’80s visual trope. We need a name for it.
It’s an incredibly versatile design language, too, being used on everything from Trapper Keepers to the Electronic Arts poster in my childhood bedroom, to, as we see here, selling cab-over-engine Freightliner trucks.
It sure as hell is evocative of…something. Something cosmic and ethereal, something bigger than all of us, something powerful and numinous that can make us really want to buy a truck. I mean, look:
Where are we? On the surface of another planet? But that’s our moon up there? Why is the ground so smooth? Is it perpetually dusk here?
The lightning! Just when I thought that sky couldn’t get any moodier or more dramatic, blammo, here comes some purple lightning, arcing and branching through the sky like bolts from an unseen Tesla coil.
So what do we call this environment and look? Gradient Thunderscape? Planet Drama? Power World? Firehorizon? It needs something suitably intense.
You’re probably wondering if a mechanic can work in such an intense environment, with that vivid sky and those looming mountains and the ever-present danger of purple sky plasma bolts. The good news is that, yes, yes they can!
The engine access in these cabover trucks seems pretty great, though I’ve been told that truckers didn’t like having to secure all their crap when they had their trucks worked on. One mechanic told me that the danger of portable TVs flying through the windshields when the cab was tipped was very real.
Oh man, I love a good cutaway, and this one is. Look, it’s a sleeper cab, too! Here’s a closeup of the sleeping area, if you’re interested:
Looks pretty cozy. I always like sleeper cab interiors. So much wall padding! I can almost feel the texture of them from this picture. Did these things come with pillows from the factory? Was there a Freightliner factory pillow part number?
Speaking of parts, this is a very artfully-arranged collection of Freightliner parts. I could see it as a striking-looking wall hanging in some trucking executive’s swanky apartment, with lots of black leather-and-chrome furniture.
Cabover trucks like these are no longer common in America, where trucks with hoods are preferred, but in Europe and much of the rest of the world, where linear space is at a greater premium, they’re still popular. They’re roomy inside despite their compressed footprint, too.
These wraparound dashboards are pretty great, too, and if large, unbroken expanses of fake woodgrain excite you, then you’re welcome. I wonder what’s behind the huge panel at the right there? HVAC equipment?
Finally, I have to come clean with you. This diagram took me way longer than it should have to process. I was reading the brownish shape as a sort of hammer; it sort of reminds me of the hammer in the flag of North Korea:
It’s not, though. That’s an overhead diagrammatic drawing of the truck and trailer, showing its improved turning circle.
Wow, this ended up in a really weird place. I’m going to stop now, before this gets worse.
But! Feel free to help me come up with a name for that general ’80s intense-sunset-on-other-smooth-planet aesthetic!
I’m not sure of the name of this style but I’ve always loved it, especially when they use full on colored gels on the lighting. I’ve read a bunch of tech manuals and brochures for older technical equipment that always seem to show a lab in a void with dramatic colored lighting and a dude pouring over his work, similar to this:
https://www.appliedmaterials.com/us/en/product-library/endura-pvd.html
I think that background is called “He-Man background” (or masters of the universe if you prefer)
This is absolutely the masters of the universe aesthetic, says this guy who grew up in the 80s. I also think Torch nailed it with “Trapper Keeper Gradient Thunderscape”
It’s part of the supergraphics movement. Sea Ranch, the famous residential development on the north coats of California, and the early design of The Gap are two prominent examples.
I painted some murals like that when I was in highschool.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supergraphics
Thats turning image really does feel like it should be from the 1920s/30s soviet union.
Tube sock stripe delight ….
Torch had the good drugs today. Fantastic post. These kinds of posts brighten up my dreary days of grinding surgical instruments in the back of a cab-over box truck at various hospitals. All for “competitive”(ly) low pay.
You might say those skies are the mood of late-stage capitalism in its dying throes before we are all digitally enslaved to billionaires.
If you give it a name you give it power.
Some things are best left unnamed.
10-4 core
Dusk and/or Dawn?
The Quickening
Electric Boogaloo
Bob
Maximum Overdrive
When I see that cab I think of nothing but the tow truck scene in Terminator 2.
“Brutalist” was a form of architecture in the years leading up to the design of buildings on my college campus back in the 70’s. It also lent itself well to armoring buildings against protests in that era.
My father drove commercial trucks pulling bottom dump trailers, building roads including parts of I-5 up by Yerka etc, back before and after I was going off to college.
He had a conventional (not cab-over) tractor but mentioned to me on my ride-alongs with him, that guys driving the cab-overs were getting beaten the F up on rough construction sites.
So that’s the word I would use to describe these things. I know Mercedes has written some very well-researched articles about why these (cabovers) were a thing.
Every time I drive I-5 from WA down to CA and back, in Oregon I see (conventional, not cabover) tractors pulling a semi and two trailers. And damn, the tractors pulling those must have some big power to be making it up some of those grades and even passing other trucks. It sometimes sucks in that large parts of I-5 through there are only two lanes. But having ridden with my dad, I cut them slack and back off, flash my lights and let them make their slow passes. A minute of letting them get on their way is not a big deal in my 12-hour trip, now split up into two days. Kinda like when you let someone in a busy traffic situation and get a hand wave, I really liked that he flashed me some lights back when I passed him.
I’m at the southern end of one of those trips tonight. In the curvy bits over the Siskiyous I was doing 5+ over the limit on the straights and taking posted 50 mph turns at 70 and some diminutive woman in an M-B GLK 450 was right on my tail and then turned her all flash on. I moved over when I could. And then two miles later, she was on the shoulder puking. I understand people getting motion sickness as passengers. But she was running solo and made herself sick. And then passed me again 30 minutes later. C’est la vie.
The term brutalist comes from the French phrase béton brut, which translates to “raw concrete”
The term can be stretched to include buildings that emphasize their raw materials, although I don’t recall any log cabins being called brutalist.
Anyway, painting stripes on something would certainly be decorative and by definition not brutalist.
Hey, when you are at about mile 455 on I-5 you are driving through my family’s old ranch.
Thanks for educating me. I had wondered where the term came from but then saw a squirrel or something and never looked it up.
I haven’t been that far south on I-5 in a long time. Mom lives in assisted living in Davis and I generally take either the 113 S or (Yolo) County Road 102 exit. Our family’s 20-acre farm (technically a ranch, since the land is largely rented out to a guy raising horses, sheep and goats) is about midway between Davis and Woodland.
My great grandfather had a walnut orchard in Van Nuys that was bordered by Haskell, VanOwen, Victory, and Sepulveda. In 1910 it was pretty much deserted. Now the 405 goes right through where their barn was.
My dad’s family had an orange grove somewhere in Altadena before that all got built up. I think it was somewhere on N Marengo Ave. I’m sure Southern California was so much more charming back when the vistas illustrated on Sunkist boxes were still a thing. Heck, when I was in college in the mid-70s, I could drive from my apartment in Del Mar and be winding around, making tires howl out in avocado groves in 10 minutes.
I tried to get my parents to buy a fixer upper in Del Mar four blocks from the beach for $150K, back then. My housemates and I would spend the summer fixing it up and more than cover the mortgage. My parents declined. Out of respect, I don’t show them the Zillow listing for that place now.
Southern California is certainly a weird place, I can vaguely remember a few oil wells still in the 60s although nothing like it was in the 20s and 30s. I think there are still a lot of wells in Beverly Hills and Inglewood but they are all hidden.
Yes. It’s kind of amusing how they try to hide them. In Northern CA, Oregon cell towers are made to look like fir trees.
My dad’s family still owned a plot of land in Arvin, outside of Bakersfield, that had an oil well that produced about enough oil to pay the property tax on what was then a prune orchard.
I think my uncle (now deceased) did whatever needed to be done to not let it be turned into a Superfund site. I had a job in Bakersfield 15 years ago and drove out there and found a sign that indicated it was going to become a housing subdivision.
There are still a lot of oil wells in SoCal, but the “oil horsies” as my mother referred to them, are often hidden.
And, dear God… driving on I-10 through west Texas at night? So many flares and so much odor. The BTUs wasted and the greenhouse gasses. I wish WE as a country, did better. Perhaps some petro-geek can tell me my all that happens. I, simple guy thinks of ways that could put to be better use.
Yeah. Probably economics. Again, someone in the industry explain it to me.
Reminds me of Trapper Keeper artwork
Totally Rad Thunder Road
Okay Beachcomber
Let’s call it the Thesaurus look because you certainly opened up your thesaurus to write this article.
Actually been used in 70s cars and VW beach buggies not sure
I’m not saying that EVERY single boy named “Willie, Waylon, Merle, Colt, or Ricky” born in towns near I-95 was conceived in a bed just like the fifth photo…..
But I am saying A LOT of them were.
And NONE of them met their dad…
Based on my encyclopedic knowledge of country music, I assure you that a few of them did. Usually in a bar, and always at the perfect age for fist fighting.
And he was a boy named Sue
Judging by the round cornered doors and cable shifter and inclusion of an axle back model that became more popular after deregulation and the STAA elimination of overall length limits in 1982, that looks to be a mid 80s model. The bumpout in the middle of the dash is used for installing radios, recording tachometers, etc. and the HVAC is mostly in the right side of the dash though a few roof top AC units were still being installed then.
“Cosmic Thunderfuck.”
Chik chikka-chikaaaah !
I call ’em Sundowner stripes. Which might be what Ford called vehicles with this type of stripe package in the 80s.
The Freewheelin Package had (has?) them too, or at least something similar.
BetaMaxx
The word is “awesome”.