Roger Sizemore had the feeling that Chrysler was going in the wrong direction. The product planners talked excitedly about selling at least 200,000 Plymouth Barracudas and Dodge Challengers annually. Yet the all-new 1970 pony cars had gotten awfully big and expensive, particularly as the economy cooled and insurance rates for high-performance models soared.
Not that Roger could do much about the situation. He was just a copy writer assigned to develop some Challenger ads. But one day he was having so much trouble cranking out some drafts that he decided to purge himself of his frustrations. Roger asked a graphic designer to doctor a photograph of a Challenger so that five inches was taken out of the car’s width. Then he wrote about the kind of car that he thought the Challenger should have been.
As you can see from the ad below, Roger didn’t buy the idea that the Challenger needed to be wide enough to fit Chrysler’s big-block V8s. To the contrary, he thought that the car should have been a better-looking and more sophisticated version of a Plymouth Duster.
With introduction day less than six months away, Roger knew that the Challenger’s direction was already baked in. So after he mocked up the above draft he stashed it in his drawer without showing it to anyone. Maybe he’d take a look at it again in a few years.
That exercise helped him get going on the real ad he was under deadline to finish. And it turned out to not matter much what he wrote because his copy got endlessly reworked . . . to the point of incoherence.
But the thing that struck Roger the most when he compared the published ad with his fake draft a few years later was that the production Challenger looked entirely too wide. That wasn’t a pony car. And it didn’t sell like one either.
NOTES:
This post is a parody. For further discussion about what is real, go here.
ADVERTISING & BROCHURES:
- oldcaradvertising.com: Dodge Challenger (1970)
- oldcarbrochures.org: Dodge Challenger (1970)
In 1970, I was Dodge material, in the form of a green metallic four-door 318 Dart Seneca with TorqueFlight and rust issues.
The constant Detroit weakness: Once a car is a success, the next generation MUST be a little bigger. And the third generation must be a little larger still. And the fourth . . . . And the fifth . . . . . Oh, and the Japanese seem to have caught the exact same disease.
I’ve never understood it. If the first generation is such an absolute success, wouldn’t you want to lock in the dimensions and make sure the next refresh has all the same stuff that made the original succeed? Especially when there’s a track record of other cars bloating and eventually failing?
I think Mazda was the only one to successfully fight that, in the Miata. I believe the current generation is still roughly the same size as the original?