(EXPANDED FROM 3/22/2024)
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. Meanwhile, the economy was cooling just as insurance rates for high-performance models soared.
Not that Roger could do much about any of that. He was just a junior 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 were 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 more stylish Plymouth Duster.
Well, at least it helped him finish his assignment. . .
With introduction day less than six months away, Roger knew that the Challenger’s direction was baked in. So after he mocked up the above draft, he stashed it in his drawer without showing it to anyone. Maybe he’d fish it out 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.
There’s a big difference between good and not so good
Roger was embarrassed by the ad that made it through all of the committees. For starters, the theme — that the Challenger wasn’t like everyone else’s pony car — was not believable. Potential buyers could see that the front end looked a whole lot like a Shelby Mustang with dual headlights. Meanwhile, the roofline could have been lifted from a Camaro. All nicely done, to be sure, but hardly original.
And out of everything they could talk about, why mention that the doors were “a little thicker”? They were actually a huge, plasticky mass that closed with a cheap hollow sound. Great way to inspire confidence in Chrysler engineering.
Also see ‘1970 Plymouth Barracuda should have been like an Australian Valiant Charger’
However, all that wasn’t what bothered Roger the most. He still thought the production Challenger looked entirely too wide for a pony car — like it had been sat on by the Jolly Green Giant. Not surprisingly, sales started off mediocre and fell off fast. Instead, the lowly Plymouth Duster flew off dealer lots. Too bad that Dodge decided to call their version of the Duster the Demon.
In a way Roger felt bad that he took a career hit because of the Challenger’s disappointing sales. He was reassigned to a Charmin toilet paper ad campaign. Not hugely exciting compared to cars, but it turned out to be lot less shitty experience.
NOTES:
This story was originally posted on March 22, 2024 and expanded on Nov. 13, 2026. This post is a parody. For further discussion about what is real, go here.
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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?
I have one of those lowly Dusters right now, a 1970 (best year) with a “non-hemi” slant six. I And it’s a great econo-muscle car, but I’d take one of those too-wide Challengers in a heartbeat if they were as affordable as the no-rust Duster that came out of desert California that my long searching finally located.
I was in college when the Baltimore Sunday Sun came out with a big full color supplement for the new Dodges including new Challenger in the Fall of ’69. Their front end looked more similar to my favorite-car-ever, a DeTomaso Mangusta, than a Shelby, and it’s been a bucket-list car ever since, as a DeTomaso was never a reality with my job.
But waited too long and now prices for junky total project Challengers are in the mid-to-high teens. Thank heaven that Dusters were made in such quantities that some reasonably affordable ones in decent condition are still around, though they too are getting much more scarce now as the only reasonably priced stylish Mopar (Swinger or Scamp? …not!) with the potential to be made a true muscle machine (not that mine will be) with a great design and sensible size. Amazing that the Duster program was done for something like $15 million. But the Challenger (and ‘Cuda) still reigns supreme in my book. And I’d have liked the 5″ narrow one just as much.