How about nostalgia in car advertising hype?
Firedome?    J2?   Blueflame?   Turnpike Cruiser?  Caribean?  Rocket 88?
Gyrotorque (aka Klunk-O-Matic)?  Forward Look?  Power-flite?   Powerglide?
Any more?

23 responses total.

 I have a LOT of Life Magazines from the 40's and 50's. The car ads are
something to behold. Also interestimg is NaT Geo's from that same era.

I just caught a glimpse of a few car "documentaries" on the "History Channel"
on cable.  We get it on Ch 54.  I saw a documentary on the Avanti, another
on the Jeep (Pretty neat.  American Bantam designed the concept Jeep and 
sold the design to the Gov't.  The Gov't then had Ford and Willys make 
the Jeeps.  I never knew Ford made Jeeps.  Bantam went under- the Gov't
felt they were not financially stable.).

I also saw a part of a series of mid 50's Plymouth ads.  

q
q
B

I like looking at *really* old ads, like from the early 1900s.  The
differences between them and modern advertising are interesting.  For
one thing, ads of that vintage have *way* more text than any modern ad.
 Modern ads are all about creating an emotion.  Back then they were
actually trying to convince you of the superiority of their product on
an intellectual level.

These days people spend 2-3 hours watching TV - back then it was 2-3 hours
reading.

Back then, a lot fewer people *could* read -- and even fewer had any reason
to look at car ads.  Those ads were pitched to the intellectual and
financial elite, not to the general population.

I don't think it was that big a difference in literacy, althoug technically
your statement is true because there were fewer people in total.  ;)

Really, though, 100 years ago (I did some web searches for "literacy" and
"1910" and didn't come up with anything obvious, but it looks like literacy
has been pretty stable since before then) the great majority were literate.
Probably bigger divisions in application between city (newspapers) and farms
(the Bible, the almanac).  Farmers would also be intensely interested in
things like cars, because they were the ones with long distances to travel
and heavier stuff to move around.  Plus there would be a lot going on with
application of science to farming - a number of ancestors on my mother's side
were involved in that area (Check out the Andrew Boss building at University
of Minnesota if you're ever in St. Paul - my great grandfather).

Enough people in even rural areas could read to make catalog publishing
profitable by then.  That's how Sears got started -- selling goods that,
until they came along, you could only get easily if you lived in a city.

One of the early 1900s Sears catalogs has been reprinted.  It's pretty
interesting to look through.

I think people were *more* literate around the turn of the century than
today.  That was before TV, radio, most forms of mass media other than
the printed word, etc.  If you wanted to keep up with family in other
cities, you had to write.  If you wanted to keep up with the latest
fashions, you had to read.  If you wanted to run a large corporation,
you had to read and write, and if you couldn't write yourself, you had
to be able to understand the process of writing well enough to dictate
effectively.  This is back when the telegraph was still king, and
long-distance telephony was still something of an impractical novelty
(remember, this was before any practical voice quality amplifier had
been invented).

Even if you just wanted to be entertained, you still had to read -- only
a relatively few rich people living in large cities could have afforded
to see plays on a regular basis - anybody on a farm (and most people
were still rusticated) would have instead been reading popular
magazines, or perhaps getting together with friends and reading plays or
playing music or whatever.  Those popular magazines survived into the
20's, although the invention of the cinema eroded their popularity, then
the invention of talking pictures and the popularity of broadcast radio
made it possible to get stories through other means, and television
merely completed the process in the 50's.

In the 1900's, only rich people had cars -- farmers (except the well
off) and other ordinary folks couldn't afford cars until Henry Ford
drove the cost low enough to make it even more affordable than the horse
(which was, in its day, expensive, of limited functionality, and a major
source of urban pollution which had to be removed at considerable
expensie.)

The Model T came in 1908?

(Re #9: Psst: "around the turn of the century" occurred in 2001. I've been
wondering what is the best way to now refer to around 1900....  "Around
the turn of the previous century"? Seems awkward, and, which previous
century? "Around the turn of the penultimate century?" Nahhh...  "Around
1900"? That'll do it.) 

I think today is still too young to call it "turn of the century".  For
all I know, it will wind up being called the "turn of the millenium" or
some other awkward phrase instead (maybe even just "y2k"--it's shorter.)

Yup, the model T was introduced in 1908.  But the assembly line didn't
happen until 1913, and the price dropped every year of production until
1927, when the design was so old used cars began to seriously outsell
the T.

It's pretty popular for people who see themselves as intellectuals to complain
that "people" (by which they mean people who don't share their interests and
socio-economic level) "are less literate today."  I don't think that's borne
out by the facts, or the massive number of people reading the web and using
email -- which, studies have shown, is cutting into the time they used to
spend watching TV.  It *is* true that people read less books, and are far less
likely to hand-write a letter (I don't think I've done one in 10 years, apart
from thank-you notes and holiday cards), but they're reading and emailing.

Reading the web  and sending email dont count. Plus anything you learn 
from watching TV doesnt count either because it came from TV!!! :P

There's always been a tendency to denigate the current generation as
less cultured and wise.  Been true at least as long as writing.  But I
also think a case could be made that people have shorter attention spans
today, and are less critical (and I don't mean "negative" when I say
"critical" here) about what they read.  Mention was made above of ads,
which is certainly interesting because I don't think you can easily
separate the effects of technology from the underlying differences in
society.  Today, ads rely heavily on color and emotion.  A lot of
attention is put into designing ads that will still be effective even on
people who aren't paying attention.  A century ago, ads could not take
advantage of color, the readers were not as rushed and impatient as
today's readers, and the science of passive persuasion was clearly not
as advanced.  So many more ads relied on words, language, and logic
rather than on a pretty limb and a likely catch phrase.

I am not entirely sure short attention spans are necessarily a bad 
thing. I think they allow people to process a lot of varied 
information. But then, I have to wonder how short people's attention 
spans really are when compared to people in previous generations. 

A couple of summers ago, I spent a few weeks at a friend's summer house 
in Nova Scotia. This house is at the end of a *really* bad road (it 
pratically takes an SUV to go down it) so going to town is a big deal. 
There is no TV at the house and the radio only gets one station. I 
noticed that after about a week in this house, everyone's pace got a 
little slower. No one had any problem reading whole books or whatever. 
I noticed that I was less impatient with my reading. So while I might 
have a short attention span when I am living my modern suburban life, 
it isnt as if it has become an innate quality. 

So true! 

Re #15:  And I'm going to take issue with "less critical about what they
         read."  When was the last time you talked to someone under 30,
         Marcus?  The "Web Generation" knows you can't trust what you're
         told.

Judging from the overwhelming popularity of the gulf war, I don't think
"the web generation" is quite as skeptical as you claim.

I don't think the "web generation" has anything to do with the gulf war.

(Apart from being the ones sent to fight it, that is.)

(Depending on who you talk to, the recent unpleasantness in Iraq is
either "the gulf war", or "the Iraq war", or "american imperialists
colonize arab lands and terrorize natives".)
(This has nothing to do with the golf war which was just fought
in Augusta, or the young spiders who attempted to colonize my house last fall.)

I've also heard "Gulf War II".  The official name doesn't seem to have
caught on the way "Desert Storm" did.

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