Honda Once Posed Cars By Moldy Meatballs And Had Flaws In Pop-Up Headlight Logic

You know what cars were once positively ubiquitous, and are now more rare than a lion’s lunch? Third-generation Honda Accords. You may remember these as the ones that had the cool pop-up headlights. These were once everywhere, and I feel like everyone knew someone who had one of these. My dad had a sea foam green coupé one, it was among the cooler cars he ever owned. I had friends in college with them, mostly the coupés, it seems, but sedans and hatchbacks, too. I have a lot of fond nostalgia for these cars, which may be why this brochure caught my eye.

Oh that, and the fact that the cars seem to be parked in front of colossal, moldy meatballs.

Seriously! Look at these things!

I guess they’re supposed to be mountains or rocky outcroppings of some sort, but the texture and color and shape reminds me more of what a big wad of meatball might look like if left on a windowsill for a week or so. Maybe that’s supposed to be moss or lichen on there, but it sure seems more like mold, big robust colonies of molds, enjoying the nutritious bounty of mount meatball!

This brochure, from 1988, also is a nice showcase of the craft of layout and design of that era; Photoshop did not yet really exist at this point; very early incarnations were around in 1998, but the initial, 1.0 release wasn’t until February of 1990. I think it’s safe to say that most of the image editing work done on this brochure was done using analog tools, not digital ones.

But a lot was done! The cars are clearly cut from their original photographic backgrounds and placed into new ones, and I suspect this is just very skilled X-acto work. Look at this, for example:

The crisp edges, that very rectangular, hard-edged shadow, all of these point to a designer with a steady hand and a sharp knife. Let’s look again at the moldy meatball pages:

Look at the attention paid to the windows and the seats, how carefully cut out everything is, so you can see through the windows. Look at the car in the background, too – lots of careful window-cutting work there, too!

It’s so easy to take for granted how easy  have it now – the latest versions of Photoshop actually have very capable object-selecting and removal tools, and we use those extensively here, as putting text and other images behind elements in a photo is intoxicating, and I’m a bit drunk on it. It’s fun, I make no apologies here.

Let’s get back to these Accords, though, and their fantastic pop-up headlights! I really like how Honda explains their benefits here, citing the aerodynamic benefits, and then noting that by being able to be retracted, the setup “protects headlights form stones and road debris when not in use.” This is true, sure, but I’m not sure how much this was really thought through: yes, sure, it would protect that sealed-beam headlight, but what damage would a headlight-smashing rock do to the headlight cover and plastic trim? I guarantee whatever it takes to fix that would be many times the cost of just buying a new rectangular headlamp at the nearest K-Mart for $5.99.

Also, here’s something I never knew: in Japan, the upmarket version of the Accord was known as the Vigor, and that one had the pop-up headlights seen on Accords just about everywhere else in the world. So, to differentiate the fancier Vigor from the more plebian Accords, those Japanese Accords, known as Accord CAs, had fixed headlights:

They look pretty decent, and are similar to Civics of that era, too, but don’t have the drama of the retractable headlamps. I had no idea these existed! There’s always something new to learn, isn’t there!

I hope your weekend is free of moldy meatballs, but full of pop-up headlights.