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newVideoPlayer("/85_Corvette_476.flv", 506, 423,""); We may laugh at the early C4 Corvette these days, since most of the ones you see now are beat-to-hell heaps adorned with custom gear purchased from Manny, Moe, and Jack. Back in the mid-80s, however, it was quite the bang-for-buck deal, selling for $25K- half the cost of the Porsche 928S- and outhandling some of Europe's hottest machinery. OK, fine, the build quality wasn't so great and the engine only made 230 horsepower and the styling screamed "small-time coke dealer," but it would eat up a Ferrari on the race track!
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newVideoPlayer("/83_Camaro_476.flv", 506, 423,""); Whether you were grabbing a gear with the 190-horse IROC- oh, wait, you couldn't get the manual transmission with the Tuned Port Injection 305- or experiencing the joys of leaky rubber seals with your Berlinetta's T-tops, the 1985 Camaro let you live it! The glitchy VHS recording just makes this ad that much more Eighties, we think.
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newVideoPlayer("/85_Celebrity_Urinesport_476.flv", 506, 423,""); Perhaps it's because every Celebrity ever made looked like it had 200,000 rough miles on the clock by the end of its second year on the road- fading plastic, trim panels a-dangling, and so on, or maybe it's the acre upon acre of clapped-out examples you see clogging up the GM section at every junkyard in the country. Either way, it seems impossible to picture the '85 Celebrity Eurosport as a new car , much less one that carried an air of class and sophistication.
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newVideoPlayer("/85_Mustang_Breakdance_476.flv", 506, 423,""); So you think the Cocaine Factory '85 Duster Ad was the most Eighties car ad you've ever seen? Maybe so, but you're tapping a rich vein of 80s-ness when you add some low-end moonwalking and vaguely break-dance-esque music to an ad for a Turbo Mullet Era Fox Mustang. And only $6,885... for the car with the 88-horsepower 2.3 liter four-cylinder.
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newVideoPlayer("85_Cutlass_Ciera_476.flv", 506, 423,""); You may know the '85 Olds Cutlass Ciera best as the car that Jerry Lundegaard gave to a couple of North Dakota hoodlums as partial payment for a harebrained fake-kidnap scheme in the movie Fargo . Quite a claim to fame, that- but don't forget that the Cutlass Ciera was all about patriotism back in the day. Yes, the Ciera was America's "native car," apparently due to Oldsmobile's "special feel." We're going to give this one an 8 out of a possible 10 reading on the Schmaltz-O-Meter™.
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newVideoPlayer("85_Nissan_Sentra_476.flv", 506, 423,""); Overhead camshaft! Front-wheel drive! Computer-controlled carburetor! Life was good back in '85, because the cheapest Nissan was also the most technologically advanced (though we're pretty sure you couldn't get the futuristic "Door Is Ajar" talking alerts in the Sentra that year). And why don't car ads have voiceovers like the Nissan Guy any more?
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newVideoPlayer("85_Nissan_Trucks_Rodeo_476.flv", 463, 387,""); After a decade of their vehicles getting vandalized by enraged Rust Belt residents whose local economies were failing faster than the mechanical components in a Ford EXP, Japanese automakers figured they'd better start working on the whole image thing; you know, associate their products with wholesome values from the American heartland, that sort of thing. Toyota went with the happy American farmers schtick in '85, and Nissan decided to break out a rodeo theme for their trucks the same year. The "Major Motion" slogan seems to have been a short-lived one for Nissan- anyone remember it?
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newVideoPlayer("85_Farm_ToyotaTrucks_476.flv", 463, 387,""); The funny thing about Toyota's 1985 claim that 95% of all Toyota trucks ever built were still on the road is that it's probably still true today (although perhaps the attrition rate is higher among Warlord Edition™ Hiluxes, what with all the high-explosive ordnance they tend to encounter in their daily routine). Here we have some wholesome-looking farmers telling us why Toyota trucks are their first choice for hauling sacks of sugar out to the moonshine still.
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newVideoPlayer("85_Tercel_Wagon_476.flv", 463, 387,""); Ever since we had an '85 Tercel 4WD wagon on DOTS , I've been trying to find an ad for the thing to use in this series. Yes, it's a hokey Christmas-themed ad, but at least there's some low-yield hoonage involved. Was 1985 the high-water mark for Toyota, before the accountants took over and focus-grouped the life out of their vehicles?
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newVideoPlayer("84_Duster_476.flv", 463, 387,""); I was a senior in high school in 1984, and I recall hearing Baby Boomers going on and on about the goddamn 1960s at the time and thinking "There's no possible way anyone will ever be nostalgic for the 80s- no way! " How wrong I was- 80s nostalgia is like herpes, with sudden painful flareups and a miasma of shame surrounding its participants. And that brings us to what I believe may well be The Most Eighties Car Ad In All Of History: a 1985 Plymouth Duster ad that was apparently shown during the 1st Annual MTV Music Awards. And you know what that means- it's poll time! newVideoPlayer("85_Pioneer_Stereo_476.flv", 475, 376,""); We had a Most 80s Car Ad Ever poll last month, and the Pioneer ad above blew the other contenders out of the water. It's got the hair product, the jarring colors, the implied cocaine abuse... but does it have what it takes to keep its crown in the face of...
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newVideoPlayer("85_Toyota_Trux_476.flv", 475, 376,""); In our experience, stereos tend to float out of Toyota truck dashboards, rather than into them (at least when they're parked in San Francisco, that is). Sure, every desperate crackhead urban entrepreneur knows that old Toyota trucks are easy to break into, but aside from that weakness they're as unkillable as cockroaches. Yes, bumpers are optional!
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newVideoPlayer("85_Pioneer_Stereo_476.flv", 475, 376,""); Now, we've seen some incredibly dated ads in the Classic Ad Watch series, but this one pitching Pioneer stereos may well be more of its time than anything yet. We've got all the elements: the 80s vision of the 50s vision of babe-itude, the drum-machine/synth theme song, cassettes and CDs, and a yuppie cokefiend in a Porsche. But maybe this ad gets out-Eightied by one of the others in the series; jump like Adnan Khashoggi's henchmen tossing a crate of Ollie North-authorized grenade launchers into an Iran-bound cargo plane to vote on this burning issue! 1985 IROC-Z Camaro 1983 Chrysler E Series 1985 Vauxhall Nova 1986 Chevrolet Camaro 1983 Pontiac Trans Am Yes, yes, we know- most of the ads are for 3rd-gen GM F-bodies. Hey, that's the 80s for you (and the Super Potential Starion ad got pulled from YouTube)! Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click...
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newVideoPlayer("85_Autobianchi_Y10_476.flv", 475, 376,""); Let's say you're Fiat, it's 1985, and you want to sell a little car based on the Panda and badge-engineered with the Autobianchi name: the Autobianchi Y10 . How do you market the car? Well, most folks in 1985 knew the answer to that question: a seriously cheezy animation featuring a curvaceous female robot with antennae sticking out of her ears!
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Now don't go confusing this '85 Vauxhall Nova with the '85 Chevrolet Nova; even though both were sold by The General, one was a rebadged Opel Corsa and the other a rebadged Toyota Corolla. But more important than the distinction between different Novas is the fact that we have have stumbled upon The Worst Rap of All Time, with lines like "It's got a punch, honeybunch/So take it out to lunch!" Not only that, we have a contender to take the Most Eighties Car Commercial Award away from the Rob Halford '85 Camaro ad !
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Frankly, we're puzzled by the drama played out in this ad for the '85 IROC-Z Camaro. There's a chiseled blonde helicopter cop obsessively following an equally chiseled, equally blonde IROC-Z driver, who scrupulously adheres to the 55MPH limit. Then they meet up in some sort of macho non-showdown in a methlab-esque desert town. Wait, are they the same man? Hey, don't worry about the plot- just listen to the heartbeat of America!
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