Many Magical Mercury Mation Magons: Mold Mart

So, I promised Matt that I would stop putting “Cold Start” in the headlines of these Cold Start posts, because Google sort of gets weird about it, or it’s confusing, or something. I promised I’d start doing that today, and make a little graphical bug for Cold Start instead. I didn’t get to making the bug yet, but at least today I didn’t technically put “Cold Start” in the hed, thanks to that painfully forced alliterative headline. Tomorrow I’ll do it for realsies, but for the moment let’s just talk about some amazing Mercury station wagons and their strange and provocative brochure art.

American Station wagons of the 1970s somehow ended up becoming such strange and wonderful beasts. They grew to immense proportions, and found themselves slathered in faux-wood and all sorts of chrome jewelry and ornamentation. They had strange regal-sounding names like Country Squire, or, in the cases I want to talk about today, which are Mercury wagons, the regal Marquis, the science-y Meteor, and the exotic Montego.

This peculiar 1971 brochure cover sort of sums up the general tone of these, an ornate, laurel-wreathed chrome badge, heraldic in look, strangely cradled by what I think is a huge wad of leather? Possibly thinly-sliced gyro meat?

The artwork for this brochure I find wonderfully odd but somehow perfect for the strange character of these wagons. Look at this page for the Montego wagons:

The Montego was one of the lower-spec Mercury wagons, which you could tell because it exposed its quad headlamps to you shamelessly, wantonly. And let’s zoom in on the illustrations up there:

What’s happening here? Are fruits being picked? Is the kid trapped in chessworld drinking something? Is it cider? Is this some kind of sick apple-based fantasy world? What’s that kid on the right doing? Charming a snake?

Let’s go up a notch to the especially oddly-named Meteor Montcalm and Rideau 500:

I guess “Montcalm” means “calm mountain,” or something like that? If so, there needs to be some explaining to the guy in this illustration, who sure doesn’t look calm to me:

Okay, so they’re showing people golfing here, and the guy on the far left sure looks like George W. Bush to me. But it’s the guy with the club that gets me; it just reads less like he’s golfing and more like he’s committing a murder with golf equipment.

I mean, sure, I’m no golfer and have never pretended to be, but that pose looks like someone frozen mid-clubbing, as in the violent, overhead-smack-the-club-down-hard kind, not the hit a golf ball kind. Maybe I’m just being swayed by the vivid red of that Tatooine-like sun back there.

Okay, once we get to the highest spec, the Colony Park and Marquis, which demurely hide their headlamps under false grilles, we see some really exciting, near-fantasy art:

Once again, computer, zoom and enhance!

Is that kid riding a giant goose? This reminds me of some sort of alternate-universe version of the old Joust arcade game, which had cabinet art that looked like this:

In this version, it’d be Joust but with a shotgun instead of lances, and you’d be flying from the rooftops of parked Mercury wagons.

Now, it’s not like these wagons didn’t have their share of magic on their own; the dual-action tailgate was pretty incredible:

You can see that and the great jump seats in action in this Ford Country Squire wagon commercial, which, remember, was really the same car as these Mercuries:

The way that rear window gets cleaned is especially interesting: there was no wiper – the window retracted into the door, where the washer fluid sprayers were, and the rubber weatherstripping acted as a sort of squeegee as the window returned to the closed position. very clever!

Also, these things were just colossal. That’s like truck bed length back there with the seat folded!