1950s Ford Commercial Makes a Sedan Into a Household Hero
Surreal commercial for Customline Victoria and Ranch Wagon shows how much has changed over the years, especially at Ford.
This commercial for the mid-1950s Ford Customline Victoria sedan and Ranch Wagon doesn’t make us nostalgic for yesteryear or want to go to our nearest soda fountain. Oddly enough, it reminds us of a scene from 2008’s The Dark Knight. We’ll explain.
The spot, which we found on the YouTube channel HaiKarate4, opens with an unnamed well-coiffed housewife talking on the phone, agreeing to meet a friend later. Once she hangs up, she looks into the camera and tells us that she couldn’t have made plans like that three weeks earlier because her husband, Dave, would’ve needed to drive their one car, a Ford Ranch Wagon, to get to work.
She adds, “When he was gone, I was practically a prisoner in my own home.” Her lack of a car meant she “couldn’t get out to see my friends, couldn’t take part in PTA activities, why I couldn’t even shop if I wanted to,” until her hubby returned on Thursday nights with the family hauler. (*We are rolling our eyes as we type, so forgive us if there is a typo here or there.)
Luckily, Ford offered an affordable solution to the couple’s problem: the Customline Victoria sedan. Dave started using that as his commuter car, leaving the Ranch Wagon free for his wife to drive. She sums it up by saying, “It’s a whole new way of life. Now I’m free to go anywhere, do anything, see anybody any time I want to.”
The entire spot is a look back at a very different era. Given that the commercial was for the second-generation Customline, which came out in the mid-1950s, all of the obvious things are as you’d expect them to be. The footage is in black and white. Dave wears a suit and hat to work. His wife wears pearls and uses a landline. She doesn’t talk in hashtags or acronyms. There’s no avocado toast on the kitchen table and she’s not taking a picture of it to show her friend later.
There are other reminders that this commercial was shot in yesteryear. The voiceover artist points out that customers can become a “two-Ford family” by choosing from 20 models that are available with Thunderbird-inspired styling and Thunderbird power. That car hasn’t been around for a while, but that’s not the biggest change from then until now. The woman in the commercial makes her husband’s new Ford sedan sound like a savior, a hero to their household. These days, Ford seems to view conventional four-doors in a much different light.
That’s what brings a particular scene in the The Dark Knight to mind. Harvey Dent (played by Aaron Eckhart) says, “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” We can’t exactly say Ford views its sedans as evildoers, but it’s certainly not throwing parades for the soon-to-be-deceased Fiesta and Taurus.
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