The Honda Civic has always been a very appealing little car, and it’s generally not been hard to sell it. It’s got all sorts of qualities practical car buyers would want, and you’d think it’d be a strong seller in places like, say, Germany, which has a long history with appreciating small, practical cars. Advertising a car like the Civic in Germany should be pretty straightforward, right? How hard could it be? Why I bet the only way you could somehow go off the rails here is if you were to do something really bonkers, like making an ad with a colossal, shitting baby. Oh no.
Yes, that image up there is from what seems to be a 1980 Honda print ad (it was presented to me as being from 1980, but I think 1980 Civics was the start of the second-gen, which looks different than the one shown here) featuring an image of what seems to be a massive baby defecating into a sort of potty.
Here, look for yourself:
The baby seems to be playing withs some cars that, for some reason, don’t seem to be toys, but full-sized cars? I’m not exactly sure why I’m reading the ad this way, but after translating it, I think I may be wrong:
Okay, so maybe those are toy cars. But this is the first time I’ve heard of a “car Philistine,” at least if I can trust this machine-translation. I’m also pretty sure this is the first time I’ve seen “ineradicable” in a car ad, which makes this ad doubly important: the first ad with that word, and, more importantly, the only car ad I can think of with a big baby taking a dump.
The style of the ad is interesting, too. I generally like this sort of expressive, evocative, coarse sort of line art, though I don’t think this is a great example. You know what’s a better example? This:
Rough, quick, expressive, crude, messy, but also charming and eye-catching and perfectly capturing the feel of that Citroën 2CV. I don’t think a modern car ad is likely to try this approach, as it violates all sorts of expected norms about polish and refinement and status. But I think that’s a shame, because this style had some real charm.
Even when showing a baby shitting.
Odd that the add at the bottom of this post was for jumbo sized packages of Pampers.
I vote we change the name of the site to “Car Philistines”.com
That only works in politics.
So basically it’s a giant man-baby, which actually looks worse the more you look at it.
And what is supposed to be spattered all over that palm tree? D:
Oh yeah! That’s Melon Husk
AKA Melonhead
Your machine translation had missed the main point. Not “played with a CAR” (and not with something else), but “played with ONE car” (and not with the other cars).
I think it’s a visual metaphor for German car buyers who turn their noses up at a small imports. Figuratively speaking, with the new Honda, it’s time to shit or get off of the pot.
God, when I first saw that lede, I thought “I knew it would come to this. Hondas putting changing stations in an SUV and touting them as an option.”
There was a time in my life when that would have been helpful….
The built-in picnic table included on 1st and 2nd-gen CR-V’s could certainly be used for that purpose.
These days, it would probably be a hit on YouTube.
Wait, where do I apply to be a pacifier? Do they de-escalate wars or something?
Also, what does he play with now? Did he get fired from being a pacifier? Too many questions. Too much Honda advertisement lore.
Ha, maybe a reference to the 1954 children’s book The Giant by William Pène du Bois (best known for his 1947 Newbery Medal winning book The Twenty-One Balloons)? It’s a charming story about a child with such a “perfect digestive system” that for every pound of food he eats he gains a pound of mass so by the age of eight he’s big enough to play with full-size cars and trucks as if they were toy diecast model cars. However, it’d follow that he wouldn’t need to use a chamberpot as shown in that Honda ad since he didn’t produce any waste… Memorably, the scientists and doctors examining the child has him smoking a giant pipe on account of how tobacco would supposedly stunt one’s growth if one started smoking in childhood.
Anyway, some American books are indeed unexpectedly popular in Germany, like with the Three Investigators series from the 1960s and 70s which was a series of children’s/YA mysteries about a team of three (natch) young teenagers based in Los Angeles solving weird and inexplicable cases with titles ranging from The Secret of Terror Castle to The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy to The Mystery of the Coughing Dragon, etc; Germans liked that series so much it became something of a franchise in Germany with films, audioplays, and graphic novels as well as new books not published in the US.
I’ve got a stack of “Three Investigators” books in the corner of my office as part of a waist-high pile of old paperbacks I need to make shelving for. I’ve no idea how I was first exposed to them in pre-internet rural England, but once I started it apparently took thirty of them for me to get bored.
I re-read them all during Covid, they are not great. I don’t know why I’ve kept them.
You must just have later books or the rebooted series from the 80s/90s, those do not hold a candle to the early ones. The original ones from the 60s and 70s are a lot of fun to read and highly enjoyable and actually hold up quite well in terms of showing the zeitgeist of life in non-Hollywood Los Angeles even though the early books in the first series had introductions ostensibly by Alfred Hitchcock.
It’s books 1-30 that I have.
Maybe I’d enjoy them more if I were American. Or if I weren’t so focused on working out the science-based explanation for whatever mystery it is they are solving.
I threw out all my Biggles books and kept these, so I must have liked these more.
The Coughing Dragon! I read a bunch of these books that were in my school library. The titles I read always ended with the Three Investigators explaining to Alfred Hitchcock how they solved the mystery. Autopian tie-in: this one involved the necessity of double-clutching when driving a diesel.
No surprise that the Germans would be charmed and pleased by the story of a child with an efficient and well-engineered gastrointestinal tract.
No shit.
vs our current reality, which seems like mostly shit.
It’s also an oddly old-looking baby. Like, why does Charles Durning have a pacifier?
Just commenting on how much I loved those first gen Civics when they came out. Still look good today.
Me, too! They look friendly and happy and just darn cute. Someone had a yellow one that worked at the commuter university near where I lived as a small boy, and I decided that when I was 16 I would buy one just like it. At 5, I didn’t know the word Civic, so I called it a “See Eye Vee Eye See”.
The first gen Prelude was equally great looking. There was a family resemblance. It came in a copper orange that was primo.
Yes! Such a great looking vehicle. Since we’re talking the 70s get me a first gen Scirocco and I’ll be happy!
That’s an option I’d probably avoid, but it probably would come bundled in a trim level.
Yes, that comes standard on the EX-crement.
I thought they were talking about the salespeople…
It makes me a little sad to see that poor Citroen tied to that tree and not allowed to roam the countryside.
1980 was not far removed from the 70’s, when avocado green, harvest gold, and various shades of M&M brown flourished.
And all those colors are present in baby poop.
Is this the connection the ad is going for? I dunno, but the German sense of humor can be pretty inscrutable to me.
“Baby poop” are exactly the words my mom uses when the describing the color of her old Cutlass.
They should make this an official GM color.