Adventures In Marketing: Ancient Buster Keaton Forces Lion Into Flat-Nose Econoline
Buster Keaton reached the height of his fame in about 1927, but Ford’s 1966 marketers must have figured that nostalgia for the allegedly wholesome silent-film era would be big, what with all the not-so-wholesome madness heating up in the United States at that time. How about we put Buster Keaton in the Econoline?
Keaton died of lung cancer later in 1966, so this may well have been his final acting role. The flat-nose Econoline had but one more year to go, so perhaps the choice of actors was a fitting one.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Hagerty and The Truth About Cars.
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I think that's the funniest forty-some year old car commercial I've ever seen.
On account of it's feline cargo, wouldn't it be more appropriately called an "Econolion"?