This is the first item we’ll have in an on-going series here at BangShift called “Dead Brand, Cool Ads”. These items will feature television commercials from dead car companies in the past. Some of the ads are campy, some of them are historically awesome, others are weird and over the top but the one thing they all have in common is that the company and cars they were promoting are gone. We decided to start with Oldsmobile because it is one of the storied American brands and the first one (of huge significance) that General Motors killed off. Olds was a bedrock GM brand and lots of people mourned its passing in 2004. Little did anyone know at that time that four years later it, the company would be like a house on fire, throwing possessions out the window, trying to save what they could while the rest was left to burn. The death of Olds in 2004 seems almost dignified as compared to the beheading of Pontiac those few years later.
Obviously, Olds had a lot of good cars over the course of their 100+ year history before being eliminated from the GM portfolio. From the famed “Curved Dash” models at the turn of the 20th century though the 1950s and the muscle car era, Oldsmobiles were aspirational cars for many people to own. The brand had cache and identity. Into the morass of the 1970s, Oldsmobile’s identity started to slip away and it became more and more “badge engineered”. Yes, the 403 stayed around for a long time, even powering Pontiacs by the time the late 1970s and early 1980s rolled around and the company had cool stuff like the Quad 4 engine which was an under-appreciated factory engine if we’ve ever seen one before. By the 1990s, Olds was basically a redundancy. The Olds Alero was one of the last gasps of individuality the company was granted by its overlords and when it came time to pare things down, GM saw the brand as a third wheel that was doing more harm than good. Ironically, they caused the entire situation themselves, but that’s another story for another day.
The good news is that Olds history lives on through historians and enthusiasts and that’s why so many cool advertisements from the company are floating around the web. Here’s a collection of our favorites in no particular order. We’ll cover muscle cars, the 1950s, the 1970s, and even the 1980s which had ad campaigns that went full cheesy. Those are pretty funny to watch now.
SCROLL DOWN TO SEE A COLLECTION OF GREAT OLDSMOBILE TELEVISION COMMERCIALS FROM THE PAST –
As an urban arcealogist there is interesting hyroglifics left here for us to learn about. Some cool sytling and sytling reduced to rubbish and land yacts needed to be shorties. Sorry Brian I would cut so mutch off the things the earth would be like one of those mild impact bumpers. Turbos with little boost we on to them things years before there release. To bad they don’t have todays devolpment for turbos. Olds had a short memory I gusse lightness in fiberglass hoods andfiberglass fenderwells ect ect but wishes we still thought in ways the potrayed the it simplicity and aproach from the fifties and sixties.
Dude, speak in English will ‘ya, you make no sense…
Other than my beloved Chevrolets, Oldsmobiles have always been a soft spot for me. They were power AND refinement…but Oldsmobile and Buick always seemed to be fighting for the same slice of the sales and marketing pie. Thanks for the trip down Memory Lane…can remember the mid-late 70’s and up commercials first-hand, the older ones as late-night viewing on the old Speedvision channel.