When Chrysler's Slide Shows Weren't In PowerPoint: Pinpoint Conquesting!

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

Back when I was semi-serious about photography— as in Pliocene Epoch photography with lots of chemicals and red lights— I scored a bunch of two-piece glass 35mm slide mounts at a camera store in Los Angeles. Most of them were empty, but a handful came with Chrysler dealership promotional slides from 1974.

This was about 1988, and so there wasn’t as much ironic distance between the era of the slides and the time of my acquisition; the slides just reeked of Chrysler’s Malaise Era desperation. I pictured the scene: a Chrysler Sales regional office somewhere in, say, Culver City. There’d be the whir and heat from the slide projector, the light beam cutting through the Pall Mall smoke, and a burly corporate axeman from Michigan trying to sound upbeat as he triggered slide after slide. Sell these goddamn Darts with the goddamn plush-cut pile carpeting, went the subtext beneath the optimistic-sounding sales talk, or the goddamn Japanese will have our asses! Cue sound of Corollas buzzing by outside…

Of course, what Dart buyers really wanted in 1974 was the Hang Ten Edition, complete with matching surfboard!




Murilee Martin
Murilee Martin

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, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.

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  • Catbert430 Catbert430 on Feb 07, 2011

    I love the poorly fitted gas cap on the Dart Hang Ten. Malaise era quality at it's finest.

  • PrincipalDan PrincipalDan on Feb 07, 2011

    I'm sorry is there something in the third slide other than a girl in a red, white, and blue bathing suit?

  • MaintenanceCosts It's not a Benz or a Jag / it's a 5-0 with a rag /And I don't wanna brag / but I could never be stag
  • 3-On-The-Tree Son has a 2016 Mustang GT 5.0 and I have a 2009 C6 Corvette LS3 6spd. And on paper they are pretty close.
  • 3-On-The-Tree Same as the Land Cruiser, emissions. I have a 1985 FJ60 Land Cruiser and it’s a beast off-roading.
  • CanadaCraig I would like for this anniversary special to be a bare-bones Plain-Jane model offered in Dynasty Green and Vintage Burgundy.
  • ToolGuy Ford is good at drifting all right... 😉
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