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?Â
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.
Nothing beats the poster Bill Sienkiewicz did for the Nissan NX2000. Still have it on the wall of my parents’ garage, because Sienkiewicz.
https://images.app.goo.gl/dbngvahBm7ZWzj2CA
omg
Ah yes, Bill Sienkiewicz. Back in the day, bought the Elektra and Daredevil comics/graphic novels he did with Frank Miller.
I was huge into the new mutants and my 12 year old brain was blown away by his year run on it.
His work was wild and exciting
One of my de-cluttering things is going thru all those comics from the 80s and 90s. Pretty sure there some New Mutants among all the X-Men, Love and Rockets, Lone Wolf and Cub, etc. Probably donate most of them, plan on keeping some.
I loved those old lone wolf and cubs!!! Ended up getting all the manga sized books when they re-released them in the early 00’s.
There are a few cars that I wasn’t quite able to buy for various reasons but really wished I could have. The 1st gen two RAV4 soft top is #2 on the list, right behind a ’69 T-top Stingray and ahead of a Westfalia.
I’d argue that art trend took hold much earlier, like early to mid-80’s. Your probably right is that it wasn’t really co-opted and commercialized until the 90’s.
I knew an older woman who bought a first gen RAV4. She was firmly in the camp of “I’m not driving a stupid wasteful truck. I just want a Corolla”. When visiting the dealer, the salesperson noticed how she struggled to get in the Corolla and asked about her back. He then suggested she sit in the RAV4. She ended up with a crazy happy teal coloured one. After about ten years of ownership it was still in great shape (a miracle in the land of more salt than road.) I’m sure it was never put in 4WD as she just used it as a suburban commuter. She sold it when she aged out of driving. I should have bought it…
My wife’s sister has in-laws that love nothing more than new white RAV4s. They have two, one in Florida and one up here in PA. They are so unbelievably boring. We got their old 2007 V6 Limited 6 odd years ago, and the amount of room in the front (side to side) is far greater than what the new ones seem to have. I’ve been in those new RAV4s and a fairly new Mazda CX-3 and I find them uncomfortable due to the lack of space from the driver’s seat and I think it’s all down to these fat center consoles.
I remember a burrito place in Georgetown that was totally covered in murals like that, inside and out, walls, ceiling, exterior, I think even part of the floor. At the time, it just felt like, yeah, this is 1995, I guess this is what we’re all doing now.
Whatever happened to that place? Probably a Starbucks or something
I’m sorry I never got to drive the original Rav4. I rented one last year; the best I can say for it is that it got me from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’ and back again without breaking down. It did so with no soul whatsoever, accompanied by the second most frustrating automotive stereo I’ve ever had to contend with…the aftermarket head unit in my 27-year-old Jeep handles Bluetooth better than that thing. And not only does the Rav4 still have a keyed ignition, it has some kind of locking mechanism that holds the key in place after you cut the ignition; you have to push the key in just right in order to remove it.
Looks like a Matador album cover cirka 1994.
My first thought was, “that looks just like the art in ‘What Pete Ate From A-Z'”
Then I learned that Maria Kalman is a famous artist in addition to the author of one of my kids’ books.
Another informative Cold Start!
The spare tire located on the hatch plus a flat cargo area that the second row seats sat directly on (and were removable and did tumble forward) meant that while they did not fold flat with the cargo area, there was much more vertical space available in the back.
I believe the cubic feet rating in a 2nd gen I had around was similar to my much larger 3rd gen Sorento. (just that the area was much taller and shorter in length)
Random fun facts: Manual, AWD first-gen’s had an open center differential and a locker and a rear torsen LSD was available through pre-facelift/VSC 2nd gen’s.
And it’s been a couple years, but somewhere around Fairfax, VA there was a house I would drive by occasionally that had multiple 1st gen RAV4’s parked in front. A couple 2-door models too! Snagged a photo a while back but it’s buried somewhere. I wonder how they’re doing.
I can’t remember if they’re the same ones but I also did spot a two-door hardtop RAV4 in blue around that area too at a local library. Very cute runabout!
That creepy art is one degree separated from the creepy Dr. Bronner’s labels. No thank you to both.
“This RAV4 Ad Is So 1990s It Hurts A Little Bit”
A little bit, sure.
For more’90s hurt it needs tribal tattoos.
For MOAR ’90s hurt those tattoos need to be EXTREEEEME!!
NO FEAR!
I still remember my favorite No Fear shirt…that brand was so popular
Now all I can think about is the EXTREEEEME posers on Harold and Kumar.
Like Buzz Bunny, shredding down a mountain on a snowboard with wicked eye lasers.
The first gen RAV4 always reminded me of a high top sneaker. Which were also very popular in the 90s.
Those early RAVs were pretty capable. I remember when the CyberTruk was launched the the Tesla stans were posting hype vids of one crawling through some obstacle course in the Calif desert and somebody replied with Grandma in her early gen RAV bombing through the same thing.
I stopped paying attention to the RAV4 about the time I stopped buying Putumayo World Music CDs. That’s not to say that a RAV4 or Putumayo aren’t perfectly fine choices, I just lost interest in their formats. I tend to gravitate to quirky, niche things and especially cars, but those tend to quickly disappear from the market or get homogenized into everycars. The early RAV4 brochure artwork is not a style I particular like, but I do appreciate the attempt to stand out.
I switched my shopping to Cinco de Mayo, only to find out they were owned by the same person! I then decided to build a roller coaster instead.
Can’t argue with your choice. A roller coaster sounds much more entertaining.
At least the chips were free
Good morning, Mr. Pennypacker, and welcome back from your trip to the Amazon.
One of my favorites of my kids’ toys is a blue softop (softtop?) Rav4 that is somehow right-hand drive? It is one of those diecast cars they have on a rack at Walgreens or CVS. These here actually! I don’t know how it got in our house (I don’t think anyone would have picked that over the “cooler” cars that are usually on those racks) but I always give a little drive when it turns up in a toy cleanup
I have one of those to, which my kid is fond of (I have no idea where I got it from, but I got it before he was born, and the RAV4 didn’t come out until about the time I should’ve been past pull-back cars). Every time it comes up, I feel obligated to mention that the engine model under the hood is clearly a longitudinal V8, which would make it the coolest RAV to exist if it were real.
Blow Oskar! Any Southern GenX with taste has a tin cutout Finster somewhere on their porch.
Patiently waiting for the new RAV5 to come out.
I only remember the soft top RAV4 existing when someone else mentions it, but I did have the little RAV4 paper fold-up model of the two-door hardtop that Toyota sent out with updates, and I think there was an outline on the paper roof indicating the large sunroof that was offered. Not exactly outsider origami (and any art that’s part of a product promotional campaign is inherently not outsider art. unless maybe if the the product is only sold by curbside pharmaceutical retailers), but just FY(‘all’s)I.
Also: I didn’t want to pry into your travel plans on Friday (actually, I did, but I’m going to attribute my failure to do so to respect for privacy rather than forgetting to go back and comment until very late), but were you headed to and are you returning from a trip to the West Coast for a purported event that may or may not be a vehicle to drive traffic to this here website? If so, I’m more likely to believe it took place, because you’d never be part of such a moon landing-scale deception.
The cheap little adventure SUV fizzled out as soon as its target market was no longer willing to accept the compromises. The RAV4 would have been discontinued years ago if Toyota hadn’t made it into a safe and boring family wagon.
Now I’m going to stretch like Stretch Armstrong and blame the downfall of the cheap bouncy SUV and the colorful advertising that went with it on 9/11. We stopped having fun after those towers came down. Protecting the family from a dangerous world is what sells now. Toyota tries to make the current RAV4 as imposing as a small-ish crossover can look, while the original looked like a puppy ready to run free and live in the moment. That’s how the terrorists won. They killed the free spirited and fun nature of the 80’s and 90’s and lead us toward an era of forever wars and the security state. We became so scared that we’ve slowly turned our cars into bunkers with vertical surfaces and tiny windows to shield us from the terrible world that exists between home and our destinations. You can’t have whimsical artwork if you want to sell a car post-9/11. You need to show an impenetrable fortress barreling through the wastelands while your children sit in their giant car seats and stare at tablets, protecting their innocent eyes from the horrors on the other side of the window.
Alright let me check my tally for that tangent. I blamed 9/11 for the rise of the security state (definitely true), the fear of everything outside our proverbial 4 walls (partially true), our fun cars dying out in favor of fortresses (eh, maybe), the decline of fun and colorful car ads (probably not), and screen addiction among children (absurd). Not too shabby for a Monday morning.
I mean, you’re not not convincing me to sign up for your newsletter.
Counterpoint: Beck’s popularity came and went, and disjointed randomness with it. 😉
When the current RAV4 debuted in 2019 (which makes it ancient for a Toyota) that face being so full of discordant angles and not-quite lining up with the hood in a way that looks not-quite intentional, I thought sure they’d be making the Adventure model’s slightly less-discordant nose standard across the line at the midcycle facelift but what they did instead was discontinue the best color and tweak the headlight detailing a bit.
Because of Covid. Maybe not because of the fear-underscoring nature of it, but because they were selling to a waiting list and didn’t have to do anything, which is why it’s now going into an unheard-of-for-one-of-Toyota’s-bestsellers seventh model year.
The 2019 Rav4 Adventure in the best color (Blue Flame, here with bonus white roof) if anyone’s forgotten;
2019-toyota-rav4-adventure-pros-and-cons.jpg (1920×1080)
As a lizard alien working for the deep state, i can say your conspiracy theories are mild but good.
I consider it more of a convoluted redirection of society than a conspiracy. You could easily turn it into conspiracy, however. These safe cars with electronic everything will eventually be used by the government to abduct us. The locks and windows seal remotely and the driver assist technology takes over. You can’t smash your way out of the car because the windows are too small for the average American to fit through. From there the cars will take us all to the sinister government-run camps. Will they be labor camps? Death camps? Breeding camps? Just regular-ass camping camps with s’mores? Nobody knows.
Breeding camps and growing camps. Think feedlots of humans. And thanks for giving us a trapping method. We hadn’t figured that part yet
Or worst of all, camp camps, where everyone is always singing Rocky Horror Picture Show until you’re begging for a transfer to a death/labor camp.
You can stuff the marshmallows in your ears to block out the singing. You’ve lost your s’mores but you might keep your sanity.
To add to your theory and info from a previous morning dump; Is Subaru successful because it still has that pre-9/11 quirky and whimsy (and not bunker, brutalist designs)? They still have decent color selections too with reds, blues and greens for most every model.
This is a plausible theory! The dream of the 90s is still alive in Subarus, which are alive in Portland.
The last 25 years sure have been a sharp intake of breath.
Once They Banned Imagine says it well.
That’s an essay worth copying and plagarizing, thanks.
Ehhhhhh…
Counter essay:
The 1980s was the last time the U.S. was actually able to present itself as moving forward with all parts. Thanks to bullshit economic policy, lying, and just a general public hatred for certain groups that allowed them to become convenient scapegoats. Thanks to some rather unfortunate circumstances in southeast Europe and in southern Africa, Europe as a whole was struggling to organize itself and it’s assets in order to compete with the U.S. Meanwhile in Japan the combination of advanced engineering, pouncing on the U.S.’s economic slowdown after 1974, zaibatsu style vertical corporate arrangements, and cheap Australian metals meant that Japan took the lead in the electronics boom the U.S. and U.K. started in 1979. In the 1980s we pulled the band back as far and as taut as it could go.
The 1990s, “The End Of History” as it was known at the time, was when the nation’s collective fingers slipped. After the 1989 Bubble Economy Collapse in Japan, Malaysia, and Hong Kong as a result of the Japanese real estate scandal the U.S. were the only ones with enough liquidity to ride out the aftermath of the 1980s. However starting in 1989 we also had a serious recession that lasted until 1991 (and doomed Bush Sr.’s chances at a second term) due to Reagan’s constant bullshitting. This was enough of a downturn that Bush decided “Fuck it, war economy” and started the first actual war the U.S. had been an official first party belligerent in since 1975, fifteen years earlier. That disillusioned a lot of people about the actual state of affairs right after the Pan European Picnic and the dissolution of the German and Polish Soviet borders with the destruction of the Berlin Wall in late 1989. The Cold War may have ended but people were concerned (consciously or not) that the U.S. would either become or seek out a new target.
By the late 1990s however technology and culture was advancing quickly enough that most people had temporarily forgotten about that in the excitement for the new future. Y2K enthusiasm was all over the place as people thought that having an interconnected world with freely available information would lessen or even end classism and would stop prejudices as people more easily learned about eachother. The internet created an optimism that hadn’t been seen since the first Armistice Day in 1918. Corporations saw that enthusiasm and optimism and started blindly throwing money around, hoping to influence public opinion and control the development of the internet. The corporations had no restraint however and overinflated the market, crashing it in in February of 2000 and leaving quite literally millions of newly minted professionals without jobs. For those who hadn’t gotten caught up in the fallout, with the rise of “bullshit jobs” in cubicle office layouts more people were feeling the cost of their education was wasted, their positions were tenuous at best (exacerbated by the rapid advances in technology that was killing entire departments from 1995-2000), and that calcification was setting in and cutting off any chance of advancement or pivoting to a new career. This created a huge swath of cynical and disgruntled people who lost faith in the neoliberal economics that had buoyed the U.S. economy since 1982, though they couldn’t explain why.
Then 9/11 happened. For the first time since 1941 the U.S. had actually been attacked. The supposed post-war invincibility the public believed for decades was shattered. People were already worried and thinking the government wasn’t doing enough, and this perceived failure only made them lose even more trust. Dubya, drunk frat boy dumbass that he was, decided “I’monna get that ol’ bad guy back fer hurtin’ mah daddy” and threw us into a war that nobody wanted. Three years of protests occurred. Three years of people begging for time and effort to be spent helping those harmed instead of on revenge. Three years of being called unpatriotic, cowardly, and weak. The U.S. had been trending towards being more progressive since the mid 1970s, something that accelerated in the ’90s. But it was like years of Cold War propaganda and McCarthyism suddenly came to the forefront with the single trigger word of “terrorism” and the newer generations who were against retaliation were shouted down. The abused became abusers. Hurt people hurt people. The distrust, disgruntlement, and cynicism became outright loathing and paranoia that was directed inwards as well as outwards.
And it’s just been blow after blow since then. We can’t have fun, can’t have nice things, can’t enjoy anything for too long, because somebody’s going to fuck it up and blame us for the loss. Best to just project an atmosphere of hostility to keep others away so they can’t corrode what little you have while you still have it.
Is this considered Global Village Coffeehouse? I love it even more than Frutiger Aero!
I’ve never been a fan of that artstyle, but it fits the first gen Rav4 well. More of a second gen CR-V guy myself.
That Rav4 gen is still the best. What the hell happened to well, all the stuff. I have thoughts.
Sometimes the name becomes just a vessel for whatever the maker wants to sell to us, and it’s been that way for a long time. Mustang, anyone? Thunderbird? Eclipse?
Not so much a vessel in this case, but more of a RAV-T.
It should be illegal for 1996 to be almost THIRTY YEARS AGO.
Imagine your wedding anniversary was last week and when people ask how long the answer is ….40 years. What??
Yeah, my wife and I are coming up on 30 years this May!
You and your spouse will soon be the last ones out there when the wedding DJ does the inevitable sit down if you have been married less than X years dance. They have it backwards, when you think about it. The couples that have been married the longest are the most likely to drop dead if you make them dance for more than 3 minutes.
Right. but at this age there aren’t weddings to attend
A bit of ranting and Rav(ing)4 all of us!