Funny that these station wagons were twice the size of the average modern SUV, used about 4x the gas, and were about 3x more likely to kill their occupants in a crash.

Yet I'd trade my KIA Sportage for an Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser in a heartbeat.

Just don't tell the ELF, the NHTSA or Nader's Raiders.

The "Chrysler Windsor Deluxe Town & Country" looks like a festive silver hearse.

The National Lampoon bits were done by Bruce McCall. Dead-on satires as I recall.

My goodness. Thanks. I just sent this link to two friends in Germany, telling them: "Everything you will ever need to know to understand America -- everything we ever imagined, a past we never actually had but that we want to get back to so desperately that it drives us nuts -- is contained on this one page."

Edited by author 08-27-2003 02:00 PM
beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, Cory- thanks a ton!

This is the sort of thing we fell in love with boingboing for... keep it up, please!

That must have been the heyday of commercial art -- remember that Ward Cleaver was a commercial artist?

I love these old pics. They remind me of a couple of art-articles National Lampoon ran in the early 80's where the artist did a car and an ocean liner in art close to these styles but incredibly out of scale, where the people in the pictures were like ants on the front seats, or the dining rooms in the ship were like the insides of impossibly large caverns.

Wow, if the 1959 Bonneville Custom Safari backed into you in a parking lot you'd probably wish it ran over and just killed you rather than suffer the agony of multiple fin impalements.

I miss chrome...

This one is great for looting!