You'll notice that one of you links for 20th Century car ephemera is preserved on the Internet by a Norwegian.
And, like how Japanese aficionados had preserved and even overtaken the abandoned production of classic Americana workwear, there's an argument that Nordic people are the true inheritors of the Great American Car Culture. You'll never see so many classic American cars from the 1950s-1970s outside of rural Sweden or Norway, where cruising in them is the highlight of many a small town's summer weekends.
Certainly part of the reason that American things can be so coveted on the other sides of the earth is how adept Americans were at that other venerable American tradition: advertising!
But the romance of the Classic American Car isn't extended to those cars produced in my lifetime. For one thing, they just got a lot uglier and more mediocre after the oil shocks of the 1970s led to the Malaise Era. But arguably another thing that shifted: the ads are just not nearly as good!
And it wasn't just ads. The whole ecosystem of American pop cultural production reinforced how cool these cars were. When's the last time a movie or TV show really highlighted an iconic American car the same way they did throughout the Mid-20th Century? The Ghostbusters Car was cool because it was already a vintage classic by 1984: the (rare) 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor Sentinel. The DeLorean DMC-12 of 1985's Back to the Future was both iconic and very 80s, but it was the exception that proves the rule. 1980s car culture belonged to European supercars and newly-desirable Japanese imports. And the 1990s weren't much better for American automotive cool, Dodge Vipers and Chrysler Corvettes exempted. What American cars will endure from the 2000s and since?
Today, American *Car* Culture can't even exist in the same way because American manufacturers basically only make trucks, anymore. And you do see the occasional (extremely expensive) imported American pickup trick thundering over Scandinavian highways as a counter-cultural message every bit as potent (and maybe a bit obnoxious) as the muscle cars of the 1960s and absurdly-finned and elongated land yachts of the 1950s were then. But with nowhere near the ubiquity of the Classic Car. Maybe it's also just a phase-shift in what a car *means* now? It's just not modernity, sex, and freedom all boiled into one machine quite the same way.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply and great observations. You can see a similar dynamic in music, too, where classic American roots, soul, and jazz artists pack houses in Europe and Japan. But yeah, as to what cars represent, your last sentence sums it up nicely. I guess it's the fate of most world-changing innovations: the more ubiquitous they become, the less magical they are. It's taken barely a generation for airline travel to go from wonder to hassle.
My dad used to get a new car every year or two through his company due to the miles he put on them. I remember him coming home after an afternoon of hitting the local dealerships, car model brochures under his arm. His company usually gave him the choice of about a half-dozen models from a couple of different makes, and he would have brochures for all of them. I went through them like they were comic books (and definitely made my choices known)!
These brochures are so cool. One of the things that’s very striking to me is how white they are. African-Americans, Native Americans, Latinos need not apply. Definitely going for a specific audience.
No doubt. Car companies were among the most conservative when it came to observing racial barriers. The first car ads with black models didn't appear until 1957, and they remained rare. Even in black-oriented media like Ebony magazine, most car ads showed white models into the 1970s.
You'll notice that one of you links for 20th Century car ephemera is preserved on the Internet by a Norwegian.
And, like how Japanese aficionados had preserved and even overtaken the abandoned production of classic Americana workwear, there's an argument that Nordic people are the true inheritors of the Great American Car Culture. You'll never see so many classic American cars from the 1950s-1970s outside of rural Sweden or Norway, where cruising in them is the highlight of many a small town's summer weekends.
Certainly part of the reason that American things can be so coveted on the other sides of the earth is how adept Americans were at that other venerable American tradition: advertising!
But the romance of the Classic American Car isn't extended to those cars produced in my lifetime. For one thing, they just got a lot uglier and more mediocre after the oil shocks of the 1970s led to the Malaise Era. But arguably another thing that shifted: the ads are just not nearly as good!
And it wasn't just ads. The whole ecosystem of American pop cultural production reinforced how cool these cars were. When's the last time a movie or TV show really highlighted an iconic American car the same way they did throughout the Mid-20th Century? The Ghostbusters Car was cool because it was already a vintage classic by 1984: the (rare) 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor Sentinel. The DeLorean DMC-12 of 1985's Back to the Future was both iconic and very 80s, but it was the exception that proves the rule. 1980s car culture belonged to European supercars and newly-desirable Japanese imports. And the 1990s weren't much better for American automotive cool, Dodge Vipers and Chrysler Corvettes exempted. What American cars will endure from the 2000s and since?
Today, American *Car* Culture can't even exist in the same way because American manufacturers basically only make trucks, anymore. And you do see the occasional (extremely expensive) imported American pickup trick thundering over Scandinavian highways as a counter-cultural message every bit as potent (and maybe a bit obnoxious) as the muscle cars of the 1960s and absurdly-finned and elongated land yachts of the 1950s were then. But with nowhere near the ubiquity of the Classic Car. Maybe it's also just a phase-shift in what a car *means* now? It's just not modernity, sex, and freedom all boiled into one machine quite the same way.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply and great observations. You can see a similar dynamic in music, too, where classic American roots, soul, and jazz artists pack houses in Europe and Japan. But yeah, as to what cars represent, your last sentence sums it up nicely. I guess it's the fate of most world-changing innovations: the more ubiquitous they become, the less magical they are. It's taken barely a generation for airline travel to go from wonder to hassle.
My dad used to get a new car every year or two through his company due to the miles he put on them. I remember him coming home after an afternoon of hitting the local dealerships, car model brochures under his arm. His company usually gave him the choice of about a half-dozen models from a couple of different makes, and he would have brochures for all of them. I went through them like they were comic books (and definitely made my choices known)!
Haha, yes, they had that comic-book appeal.
These brochures are so cool. One of the things that’s very striking to me is how white they are. African-Americans, Native Americans, Latinos need not apply. Definitely going for a specific audience.
No doubt. Car companies were among the most conservative when it came to observing racial barriers. The first car ads with black models didn't appear until 1957, and they remained rare. Even in black-oriented media like Ebony magazine, most car ads showed white models into the 1970s.