Remembering Japanese cars from the past
Just found this 1983 Toyota Carina advertisement on Youtube:
Powerwindows, powersteering and stains on the seats? Sounds like a Carina MyRoad! ;)
Too bad the first video of the previous posting isn’t working anymore:
More carina ads I posted in March 2008. Perhaps I should collect them as Flash video files and store them locally here. ;)
Last week my colleague told me about this hilarious TV series from the 80s:
Automan is about a computer wizzard working for the police creating an program which makes him an Artificial Intelligence hologram which fights crime, with a sidekick called Cursor which is a thing that can draw polygons into holographic images as if they were real! Take Superman, Knight Rider, Airwolf, Battlestar Galactica and Tron, mash it together and you have Automan!!
Hilarious enough Cursor becomes a Lamborgini Countach quite often in the series and he drives Automan around town and takes cornes square with any speed!
Cursor brakes, you hear the tires squeal, but he brakes instantly. Amazing!!
Of course you can’t hurt a hologram, so bullets have no use:
Amazing! I wonder why the Dutch television never picked up this high grade tv series while we were stuck with The A-Team, Knight Rider and Airwolf!
Ofcourse this is hilarious now, but back then my colleague really loved this series, just like I loved Knight Rider or The Dukes of Hazzard. Nowadays you really see poor quality on those series as well. Even the first movies of Shuto Trials look rediculous nowadays: what use is doing 180s forward and reverse on driving on the Shuto Expressway? And those action shots are all shot doing 100km/h and then doubled in speed.
What would people think of Initial D in 10 or 15 years time? Would they think it was rediculous as well? In some ways I already find it rediculous and the CGI of the first stage is really outdated nowadays and that will only get worse in 10 or 15 years of time…
Just came across this Celica XX advertisement from 1981:
As you can see the Celica Supra is being drifted through out the whole ad. Did they actually think in the 80s that a car is faster when it is able to drift??
Last week I blogged about the Toyota Celica XX advertisement with the ELO (Densha Otoko) theme in it. This week I have a Japanese Celica XX advertisement with Grace Jones!
I can understand why they compare Grace Jones with the Celica XX: both are square muscular superstars but I personally would prefer the Celica XX above Grace Jones. ;)
A nice detail is the mirror shot at 19 seconds: it is a bit the same as the mirror shot of the New Carina catalogue (S59-3):
Same style, same era?
Just found this Japanese Celica XX Advertisement on youtube:
As you can hear, the music is Twilight by Electric Lights Orchestra. Apart from the fact that I’m an 80s (electronic) music fan I immediately recognized the main theme from the Densha Otoko J-Drama.
You can view the opening credits here:
Funny they used the same theme for both videos! So now there is a link between the Toyota A6 platform and Densha Otoko! ;)
Found some more Toyota Carina TA60/TA61/AA63/TA63 ads on Youtube:
And what about this great 1984 Toshiba VCR ad by Ultraman?
Are all Japanese ads from the 80s this wacky??
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