Design for Dreaming

Corvette Sting Ray circa 1965 from a Chevrolet photo gallery at the Daily Beast


Your Head Trucker notes that Chevrolet celebrated its 100th anniversary last month.  To help them celebrate, here's a few films made by General Motors in years past, maybe you'll get a kick out of them like I did.

Chevrolet Leader News from 1938, one of a series of public-relations films featuring several short, amusing items, including a pipe-smoking cow:



Here's your chance to see what 1955 looked like in these TV commercials from Chevrolet:



And this highly innovative - if very, um, campy - song-and-dance number comes from the 1956 GM Motorama held in New York, featuring production models, concept cars, haute couture, and Frigidaire's Kitchen of the Future:

Designing the Future, 1958

Click to enlarge these:


Um, so how much do these people spend on Windex, huh?


If the house is rockin', don't come knockin'.


Who needs interior doors when you've got plastic curtains, right?


Title of this pic is "Limitless Electricity." Got your home fusion pile set up yet?


Imagine how many sales clerks it would take to show all those home-shopping customers the goods, one by one.

Here's a well-made short film by Chevrolet from 1958, which focuses on more than just car styling:  the "American Look," as they call it, was being applied to everything in sight at that time.   It's not your Head Trucker's favorite style, by any means - my taste was old-fashioned even way back then - but those of you who get off on the Jetson-y "populuxe" will no doubt cream in your jeans over this thirty-minute look at the subject, which goes by surprisingly quickly.  Lots more I could say on the topic, but I'll just let you fellas make up your own minds about it.  This is an interesting reminder of styles and tastes and concepts from a half-century ago - as well as how things got designed before we had computers to make it easy.  Enjoy.




Bonus: After the jump, here's a real heartbreaker for you from the same period.  Sigh.