See that terrifying beast up there? It’s an exotic animal, one you’re unlikely to have encountered in the wild, but one that I’m almost certain you know the feel of. Well, of its skin, at least, when not wrapping whatever organs pulse and ooze and secrete inside the body of this animal – which I don’t think is a mammal, as it has neither hair nor nipples, and believe me, I’ve checked – but rather when used as upholstery for such things as furniture and, yes, car seats.
That animal is a nauga, and the when its hide is used for upholstery purposes, we call it naugahide.
Well, sometimes carmakers have given it different names; back in the 1950s, GM called it cordaveen when used on Buicks, as you can see here:
I think the name was supposed to be confused with or at least allude to cordovan leather, which is used in high-end shoemaking, kind of like how my now-banned line of synthetic clam meat was called Kleamn™ before those liars at the FDA got all up in my shit about my secret family process for making synthetic clams, which they found “dangerous” and “unfit for consumption” and a bunch of other meaningless buzzwords.
I’m sorry, but if anyone thinks those assholes at the FDA would be so much better at keeping “chunks of rubber, epoxy-based resins, and various tree saps,” (if you believe their bullshit reports) out of their synthetic clams, then feel free to buy their synthetic clam meat, which, I’d like to remind you, does not exist.
Sorry, I’m getting off-topic. Back to naugahide! GM also called the stuff other names, like Morrokide in Pontiacs:
Naugahide was developed and first marketed under the name back in 1936, and the name seems like it could have been from Naugatuck, Connecticut, which would be a pretty amazing coincidence seeing as how the animal the hide comes from is called the nauga as well. What are the odds?
Okay, fine. Maybe the nauga isn’t a real animal. Maybe Uniroyal makes the PVC-based naugahide fake leather, and maybe back in the 1960s Uniroyal hired ad man George Lois and designer Kurt Weihs to come up with a way to make synthetic leather more fun and interesting to people, and they came up with the concept of the nauga, the beast from which naugahide is harvested.
I suppose after you make an endearingly ugly-cute beast like the nauga, you’re not really going to want to base your whole ad campaign about how you capture them, slaughter them wholesale, and peel off their skins, so the lore of the nauga is that they willingly and painlessly molt their skins once a year. Then Uniroyal operatives collect and harvest the hides, which are then processed into the hard-wearing naugahide most of us have fallen asleep upon and soaked in copious amounts of drool, which, thanks to the non-porous nature of the material, likely just pooled on the surface.
In addition to the use of naugahide on furniture, Uniroyal also made actual dolls of the nauga, which were, of course, all naugahide.
I remember there was one of these in a beach house my parents rented when I was a kid, probably sometime in the 1970s? I remember being pretty fascinated by it, not just because of its bonkers looks, but also because it felt and smelled and tasted just like the seats in our 1973 Ford Country Squire.
It’s kind of amazing just how much marketing was undertaken for fake leather. A huge nauga suit – probably multiple ones – was made, and some dude put it on and went on talk shows like The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, as you can see up there. I believe that the woman in that picture was romantically linked to the nauga for a while at least, and they had a child that provided at least some of the genetic material used to make one of the later clones of noted actor Danny DiVito.
Carson became a spokesperson for Naugahide, which, if you think about it objectively, is bonkers. Imagine a celebrity of an equivalent status to Johnny Carson today shilling for some artificial upholstery today. Can you picture a Jimmy Kimmel or Kelly Ripa or Nathan Lane or whomever doing ads for Alcantara or Clarino or Fabrikoid?
More importantly, I think there’s an opportunity here thanks to the nauga. Since it’s already established that nauga skin is used for many industrial and consumer uses, the companies working on synthetic vat-grown meats should leverage this already-established icon and cast it as the source for naugasteaks or nauganuggets or naugaliver or whatever they’re making!
Just, you know, watch out for the FDA. Those fuckers have no chill.
My dad left on Christmas Eve 1976 to hunt Naugas.
If he ever returns, he has some explaining to do.
The divorce rate in the 1970s was something. So much collateral damage. In hind site it was probably a good thing. I remember working for my dad back in 1988 and at least once going home and telling my mom, “I understand why you divorced him now!”
Wait, hold up, Naugas are/were REAL?! Like an actual, established fictitious animal that was part of marketing and stuff?? I thought it was just a joke that boomer parents made up for their kids, about how many Naugas died to make that seat/couch/whatever.
If I remember correctly, there was a similar joke in the text version on the Leisure Suit Larry game about a Naugahide door.
Well, nice to see the nightmare fuel of my childhood again. I never encountered a small, stuffed one, but the full-size suits were absolutely terrifying to see as a kid.
Don’t worry Torch the FDA will be gone in a few weeks and you will be free to shill your “I Can’t Believe its Not Clams” harassment free.
If he does make someone sick, no CDC tracking outbreaks.
There has never been a better tome for synthetic clams.
I’m sure the folks in the Whitehouse would appreciate a delivery of artificial seafood. The Clamander in Chief might even insist on having the first.
As a model car builder in the 50’s and 60’s I was intimately familiar with this stuff – they sold swatches of it in all sorts of colors and textures to finish off the interior of my models, only problem was it was so thick it just didn’t look right. And of course, you got glue everywhere trying to do some of those fabulous patterns the car factories were doing.
It was a fun way to spend hours of time tho!
George Fucking Lois. Please go watch Art & Copy
The body panels on my Velorex are made of the finest Igelit but in this case the name came from IG Farben.
Tasted?
Goal now reached of learning something every day, thank you.
Naugahyde was first marketed in 1936, which was also the year that Girl Scout cookies were first sold nationwide. Coincidence? Yes, yes, probably so.
Ever since they stopped using real Girl Scouts, the cookies just haven’t been the same.
There’s always Brownies.
If you told me there was a Rankin-Bass special about the Nauga, I’d believe you.
That’s definitely the Abominable Snowman immediately after his Spring shearing.
His teeth look fine now that Hermie has been looking after him.
This has to have been derivative of the 1963 children’s book Where the Wild Things Are.
“Do you hate it when your kids fall asleep in the back seat? Install a Nauga back there and they’ll possibly never sleep again!”
Pontiac Morrokide? Funny, more than a decade ago some photos were posted online of a 1964 Pontiac Bonneville station wagon abandoned on a beach since 1973 with some of its startlingly blue upholstery still astonishingly intact; the beach was at Morro Bay, California. Heck of a coincidence with the nomenclature.
https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/attachments/uploadfromtaptalk1353342183548-jpg.1793195/
I’m sweating just thinking about it.
I sent in some boxtops to obtain a mini-Nauga in the 70’s. There was a promotional campaign with a Nauga-backstory, an Oompa-Loompa adjacent tale that involved the Naugas being able to “voluntarily” shed their skins without being harmed for the greater good of General Motors and Herman Miller. of course there was no apparent gain or financial renumeration for the Naugas. Unfortunately, my mini-Nauga went the way of all those other trinkets upon my leaving the nest.
As someone who has been sorting through all the “treasures” my parents kept when I left they did you a favour.
In my youth this was simply known as pleather.
SAT question of the day. Pleather is to Naugahide as ______ is to Kleenex.
Facial Tissue
But now re-purposed as “vegan leather,” which is not leather made from the hides of vegans.
Although maybe it ought to be.
But what to do with the rest of the vegan? They taste terrible. Ya think that eating organic produce all the time, they would taste better. But no, they taste of bitterness and self righteousness.
I am just the age that I remember the 70s, remember and owned as daily driver cars and trucks from the 60’s and 70’s and yet not old enough to have one bit of nostalgia for anything from the 1970s. Everything was poor, junk, covered in browns, and smelled of cigarettes. That includes cars, people, homes and everything else.
I bet if someone gave you a slot car racetrack you would be all over that shit.
It would still smell like cigarettes, though.
Yup, cigarettes and ozone.
Oh yeah. I was born in 1970 and my childhood is a swirling mist of brown and avocado green with a splash of burnt orange thrown in. And the pervasiveness of smoking in the 70s is no joke… literally EVERYONE smoked. The living room in our house was paneled in some sort of linen-texture stuff and every time Mom would scrub it down you’d see the yellow nicotine stain come off.
I have one aunt and uncle who were early quitters, before the ’70s ended. They ended up with the money to retire to Florida and the health to enjoy it and are now the only survivors of their generation. I just visited them back in Feburary.
Listening to my mom, who smoked for 40 years, trying to breathe just hurts.
Fortunately my parents, like a lot of Boomers, quit not long after the 70s ended. Dad quit in 1981 or so and Mom about 1984.
I am a year older and for sure. I was joking with my mom just last week that she use to smoke at her desk while working at the department of heath.
Well I guess I’ll be spending the rest of today on eBay trying to find one of those giant Nauga costumes for Torch to wear at industry events.
You can’t put Torch in a costume. I’m not entirely convinced the person we know as Torch isn’t already some kind of creature in a costume (and I mean that as a compliment).
No, Matt needs to don the nauga costume for industry events. I’m not sure why but it needs to be him.
Getting some strong “wet meat” vibes from this paragraph:
“I’m sorry, but if anyone thinks those assholes at the FDA would be so much better at keeping “chunks of rubber, epoxy-based resins, and various tree saps,” (if you believe their bullshit reports) out of their synthetic clams, then feel free to buy their synthetic clam meat, which, I’d like to remind you, does not exist.”
“If you can find a better car, buy it.”
I always thought Lee screwed up the delivery of that line; “If you can find a better car, buy it.” This being the era of “voluntary” import quotas, the line should’ve been “If you can find a better car, buy it.”
Many did…
Just to be clear, no TV host in recent years was even half the celebrity that Johnny Carson was. The dude was in everybody’s bedroom, every weeknight, for like forty years. Some sociologists point to his retirement as the beginning of the decline of American Civilization.
Celebrities of that stature don’t exist anymore, due to the fragmentation of our culture.
Pretty sure he was in a lot of bedrooms over the years.
Hey-oh!
My dad used to sell office furniture and I had a nauga sitting on the end of my bed growing up…
Did you get any sleep with that shark-toothed demon owl sitting there, grinning at you with a mouth large enough to bite you in half?
The ribbed metal base of that Buick seat is so midcentury, I can smell the casually omnipresent tobacco smoke from here.
You’re ingesting/imbibing the good stuff this morning, Jason. Can’t even tell your ‘hide from your ‘hyde.
Had this on the submarine also, every seating surface had a naugahide covering. In the crew’s lounge if you fell asleep we called it a nauga-nap.
More things I never knew existed but now had to go out into the wild internet to look up more info on., thanks Torch.
In case anyone is wondering, there are apparently many different breeds of the Nauga out there. Also, aged Naugas from the 60’s and 70’s are apparently going for hundreds of dollars on ebay with some being more rare than others.