This RAV4 Ad Is So 1990s It Hurts A Little Bit: Cold Start

I’m traveling today, so I’m not sure how much I’ll have on the site, but I can at least do a quick Cold Start before I get to sleep so I can get up early for the flight, right? Sure I can. And for some reason I feel compelled to talk with you today about how much a seeing a certain visual style can take you back to a very specific time and place. In this particular case, it’s a Toyota RAV4 magazine ad, and the style is so fiercely and powerfully mid-1990s that seeing it was like someone accidentally stepping on one of my memory-glands, releasing a huge squirt of reminiscence-juice all at once.

I happen to be somewhere where an April 1996 issue of Wired is on a shelf, and I found myself flipping through it, marveling at what a time capsule of that era is is. It was a strangely optimistic time, with lots of Big Things seemingly happening all around us, and there were all sorts of new, powerful tools to design with and create bold new visual looks with. I was in the design field around this time, and I remember it being very exciting and fun.

Of course, the ad I saw had a design that wasn’t about new tech or tools; quite the opposite, really. Here, have a look:

This isn’t about the rise of the internet or desktop publishing or surfing the net or cyberwhatevers, this feels far more like a major 90s visual trend known usually as “outsider art.” Or at least very influenced by it.

Of course, the artist here, Maria Kalman, wasn’t really an outsider artist at all, she was a very accomplished artist and illustrator who has had exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, about as insider art as you can get.

Still, the sort of deliberately crude, maybe naive style here, along with all that text, feels a lot like the work of much more actually outside outsider artists that were huge in the 1990s, like Harold Finster. Finster was a Baptist minister who lived in Georgia and created thousands and thousands of paintings and sculptures.

I bet you’ve seen some of Finster’s work. You know the Talking Heads album Little Creatures? 

Finster did that one. And all of his work has a similar sort of style, and he always thought of them as ways to evangelize more than anything else. He built a sculpture garden of sorts at his home in Summerville, Georgia, which you can see in the video for REM’s Radio Free Europe:

I was in Atlanta in the early 1990s and outsider art stuff was absolutely everywhere, especially Howard Finster. So, when I saw that RAV4 ad, it brought back a ton of memories of that time in my life, which was generally pretty fun and creative, so that was nice.

Also, that first-generation RAV4 will always remain my favorite, and it’s really such a far cry from what the RAV4 has become. Let’s take a moment to compare. Here’s the current RAV4 you and about 30,000 of your dollar-friends can buy, and below it, a first-gen RAV4 soft top:

The modern iteration of the RAV4 has become – and has been for years – one of the most mainstream, safe-bet, common SUVs you can buy. It’s a staple of Target parking lots all across the land, a rational, reasonable, reliable family car. But it started out as a sort of unexpected and mildly bonkers off-roader.

The soft-top two-door one especially so; these were small, unashamedly goofy little cars that were all about fun, but still well-engineered Toyota fun. They had a novel look and were not suburban family hauler go-tos.

In that way, maybe they were a lot more like the earnest and un-self-conscious outsider art? Something colorful and a little strange and still somehow appealing, with no real polish or refinement, just a barely contained exuberance.

The new RAV4? That may be more hotel art.