I’ve actually written about these obscure Isar cars before – they were an attempt by Goggomobil to go a bit larger, a bit more upscale – but I’m coming back to them because their painted brochure art is always so strangely evocative. Like this picture here: The guy is so lost he had to stop and whip out his little map in full sunlight, in a standing position, so he could, you know, really orienteer, and in the process locks eyes with the young woman in the back seat of that other passing Isar.
Now, normally, if you’re lost and in an Isar and you saw another Isar pass by, you could be pretty damn sure that you were near an Isar dealership, or the Isar factory, or the breakdown site of a transport truck with at least one other Isar on it.
What’s strange about this frankly wonderfully-rendered image is the expression on the dude there. He looks so stiff, like he’s faking everything, and that rictus smile on his face seems to be hiding some sort of nervous secret. I don’t buy he’s really lost, or looking at that tiny map.
At first it seems flirty, the way he’s locked eyes with the girl in the back, but what I really think is going on is that she’s clocked him as something that doesn’t fit, something not quite right, and hopefully she’s going to warn the driver to keep going, don’t stop, because that dude in the red Isar is creeping her out.
Will there be an Isar-on-Isar car chase? I hope so! I’d love to hear what these 30 air-cooled horse flat twins sound like when they get really wrung out, you know?
I’m far from a neophyte, but I’d never heard of this model until today. Thanks!
“Colonel Pieter Deventer (Clark Gable) is an intelligence agent of the exiled XXXXXX government, working to liberate his homeland from XXXXXX occupiers. He divides his time between secret missions in the XXXXXX and trips to England to consult his superiors and a British general. Deventer is ordered to keep an eye on singer Fran Seelers (Lana Turner), who’s suspected of collaborating with the XXXXXX . Both Deventer and Seelers join the shadowy XXXXXX underground, making contact with a flamboyant resistance leader known as “The Scarf” (Victor Mature).
As “Carla Van Oven”, Seelers is assigned is to use her feminine charms to gain the confidence of XXXXX officers and gather information.”
Who’s up for a “What happens next?” story contest based on this picture? 😉
Those were pretty popular cars both in Germany and Argentina where they were also built. Unfortunately the early ones had a lot of issues which damaged Glas’s reputation. But they still made over 70,000 of them.
He’s thinking “Isa-r driving by – she was in the back seat. I know she-saw me”.
Is he perhaps distracting the other Isar while simultaneously summoning the flying Circle-S (with wings) which is coming over the mountain top? Is it going to “absorb” them??
Congratulations, Torch, on making this copy editor need to look up a word. You should see the rictus smile on my face!
I love how they call their cars Personenwagens.
Less trucks and SUVs and more personenwagens please.
The lady up front is interested, the lady in back is thinking “Drive, Tony! drive! get us the hell away from this madman!”
Tony? Tony is high as a damn giraffe.
It looks to me like she is not looking at the chap with the map. I think she has just spotted the person with the hockey mask and chainsaw emerging from the forest.
Speaking of air-cooled flat twins, I’ve recently made it my life’s mission to own a BMW 700. Maybe replace that 700 with a 1200, but that’s besides the point.
They’re great cars. Light enough that you may not feel the need to replace that 700.
I know I’m beating a dead horse while preaching to the choir, but I love that 2 tone paint.
Ok, the passing car is almost perpendicular to us because it is almost a perfect side profile of the car. The creep’s face is more than 90 degrees from the car because we can see part of his far eyebrow. So… he is side eyeing a car at more than a 90 degree angle and appears to have been doing this before this image because of that killer smile (smile of a killer). As we all know SE (side eyeing > 60 degrees = Serial Killer or SATAN!!!!
Torch, haven’t we already scolded you for making up car brands?
As for the the man with the map, that guy fucks. He knows it, the ladies in the car know it, and once he is done pretending to be lost he is going to follow their car to a rest stop threesome. There is no other possible explanation for the way they are looking at each other.
I like these, they are proof that even German engineers can get stuff wrong. Only at a very late stage were they changed from front to rear wheel drive ( having the engine way ahead of, and high above the driven front axle led to, erm, some stability issues) so they put the gearbox in backwards.
Then, to sell more of them, having fixed the warping of the engine problem and the whole windows falling out thing, they changed the name from that of an obscure and unavigable Bavarian river to that of an obscure and uncatchable Pyrenean goat/ antelope.
He’s not lost. He’s looking for the best place to bury the body in the trunk.
Look natural, nervous smile. Oh good, the windows are up.
That hitchhiker’s body is getting a little ripe.
I was going to say that he’s looking for a victim, but your thought may be correct. I suppose it could be both though.
What the picture doesn’t show is that he isn’t wearing pants.
Which explains both his smile and her interest.