The Popular Animalizations of GM's Ads

Ford's commercials rendered cars animal; GM used animals to play on our emotions.

Hiya, Readers!

It’s SuperBowl week and all of the buildings are red-lit here in Kansas City. Even if you don’t care who wins, you may find yourselves at parties where the game is on—including the commercials, which are some of the highest-priced air time in a calendar year. Next week I’ll write an analysis of Dodge’s ads, and then, as commercials from SuperBowl LVIII become available on YouTube, I’ll take a look this year’s ads to see what’s new and which of the old tricks are still in play. After that, it’s time for a conversation about who or what animals are and how our car commercials reflect old human attitudes toward them and our long-broken relationship with them.

Aaron

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Photo by Ali Moharami via Unsplash

It’s worth noting that the animalization of motor vehicles was not unique to Ford Motor Company but an auto-industry-wide phenomenon in the years following World War II. In Robert Fria’s book Mustang Genesis there’s an excerpt from an interview with Johnny Najjar, who’s credited with naming the Ford Mustang, that tells the story of how he came up with the name:

R.H. Bob Maguire, my boss, and I were looking through a list of names for the car. I had been reading about the P-51 Mustang airplane and suggested the name Mustang in remembrance of the P-51, but Bob thought the name as associated with the airplane was too ‘airplaney’ and rejected that idea. I again suggested the name Mustang, but this time with a horse association because it seemed more romantic. He agreed and we together selected that name right on the spot, and that’s how it got its name.¹

It’s worth noting that “the car” Najjar mentioned in this interview was a two-seater prototype officially known as the “Ford Mustang Experimental Sports Car,” which was produced in 1962, three years before the four-seater that the world came to know as the Mustang hit the market in 1965. Based on his interviews with Ford executives, Fria concluded that although the two cars shared the name “Mustang,” the two-seater’s design never influenced the four-seater that eventually appeared on the market. He went on to emphasize—somewhat perplexingly, given Najjar’s account—that “none of the Mustang prototype cars or the 1965 production version was ever named after the P-51 fighter plane!”² He’s splitting hairs here because Najjar had already intimated that he got the name from reading about the P-51. Just because he found another reason to justify using it doesn’t mean the reason he gave Maguire was the actual reason he came up with the name “Mustang.” The only sense I can make of Fria’s fine distinction here is branding. Had the P-51 officially inspired the name “Mustang,” the car would have been logoed with airplane images, like the Lincoln Aviator, instead of with the horse imagery with which we’re familiar.

Fria also noted that Maguire “came from General Motors as an interior stylist in the early ‘50s” and had been “heavily involved in the design of the 1955 two-seat Thunderbird”³; and this is important context for the commercial we’re about to see, a Chevy Impala ad produced by GM in 1958. The ad opens with a man flying a gyrocopter, suggesting that not only at Ford, but across the automobile industry there was a general tendency to animalize consumer vehicles, particularly as horses, and also to see them as technological descendants of war machines. (You’ll recall that we saw this same pair of associations with the Ford F-100 in one of the commercials featured in my recent analysis of Ford’s ads.) And the transfer of executives between auto manufacturers was one way the paradigm that figured vehicles as animals traveled within the sector.

Since Maguire came to GM from Ford, it’s worth recapping my analysis of Ford’s commercials, which animalized its cars in various ways. This animalization was a logical extension of Henry Ford’s assembly line, which was modeled on the disassembly lines of Chicago’s rendering plants. Sometimes Ford cars were associated with powerful species, e.g. the Ford Raptor, framing them as predators at the top of some vehicular food chain in the wild of the highway, or in the margin beyond paved roads. In other cases, Ford cars embodied coveted animal traits, e.g. the Mercury Cougar’ svelte independence, marketed to women in the 1970s. In all cases, though, Ford’s appropriation of animals was straightforward and matter-of-fact, like it was common sense that a car was somehow animal.

GM’s commercials started that way but quickly became more subtle. As in Ford’s commercials, in GM’s we see appeals to the animality of the company’s ideal driver. But beyond the logic of “this car is an [animal name] and driving it makes you a [animal name] too,” in GM’s commercials we see a greater awareness of a long tradition of what animals have meant to humans. GM leveraged this tradition to other Latinos and pay homage to Black culture while selling to white drivers, to pander to single professional women in the ’80s and ’90s, and to manipulatively posture GM cars as family members—including pets.

1958: The Chevrolet Impala

Before you read my analysis, what did you see here? How was the Impala animalized in this commercial?

You do realize the “Leave a Comment” button above has been strategically placed to elicit for-real responses from readers like you, right? I’m genuinely curious what you think about this!

The gyrocopter at the opening of this commercial associates the Impala with lightness, speed, and agility, and follows the logic that pilots prefer fast cars.⁴ Or, in the commercial’s words, “fun is in the going.” As the narrator mentions “head[ing] for the peace and quiet of the country” (0:50), the Impala ambles past its predecessors, horses, who have been literally put out to pasture. Or fenced in so they’ll stay off the highway. Behind another fence we see a farmer who’s all too willing to show off a lamb for the kids to pet. Against the retired horses and humble lamb, the Impala is easily the most exotic animal in the commercial.

Here we see the same coded sexualization of the automobile we saw in Ford’s commercials. There’s a shot of the car’s rear, a mention of the “Turbo Thrust V-8 under the hood” (1:10), and an encouragement to “just open her up a bit” (1:14). It’s an appeal to an animal human masculinity defined in terms of sex drive, revealing the extent to which GM saw women as accessories, like cars. As someone who actually loves his wife, it annoys the daylights out of me to see this guy’s wife getting in the backseat so his 8ish-year-old son can ride up front. You can ride up front when you’re older, Junior.

As time wore on, GM had to find an animal-related language for pitching their cars that wasn’t so offensive to women. In fact, in 1974, while Mercury was still making Cougar commercials that objectified women, GM had at least begun speaking directly to female customers, albeit in a pander-y, pedantic, or parental way.

We’ll see that in a minute; but first, GM had some problems figuring out how to pitch their own cat-branded cars, starting with the Buick Wildcat.

1960s: The Buick Wildcat

At first, GM resorted to racist figurations of implicitly Mexican bandits portrayed as too primitive to work the Buick Wildcat and too hapless take it at gunpoint from an unarmed white male driver. (This commercial has aged very poorly and I’ve decided not to feature it visually here. Here’s the link if you want to see it.)

In this 1967 commercial, Buick used a car wash to sexualize a feminized Wildcat. While a young-ish blond woman waits in the driver’s seat, the camera does a rotating close-up of the car, ogling it as a group of men caresses it with sponges. Instead of washing sounds, we hear some Aquarian sixties music set behind soundbytes about the car’s appearance. These soundbytes and the ogling close-up footage of the car’s body parts, especially the Wildcat emblems, are literally catcalls. At one point we hear a male voice say, “The Wildcat…is a woman.” Another male voice ogles, “Look at those lines…”

Alternatively, we might say the car here is performing wildcat-ness. It’s crouched in tall grass (or a cornfield, maybe?) as it’s being groomed by this pack of men. After it’s clean, as it prowls out onto a gravel road overhung with forest, we have the sense that the engine may have been running while it was parked in the tall grass back there, purring at the attention. And the center of that attention is the woman in the driver’s seat.

The Wildcat was four years old when this commercial was made, but 1967 was also the Cougar’s inaugural year. This ad puts the “wild” in “Wildcat,” with its rural frolicking and backroads driving shots in a Middle American landscape. Contrast that with the coastal high-life aesthetic of the Cougar commercials in my analysis of Ford’s ads—its appearance in front of a mansion and Farrah Fawcett’s adventure to the beach—and it’s apparent that Wildcat was working to be the everywoman’s car, while Cougar sought to be a ride for the who’s who and the so-and-sos. The geographic and class differences in the two cars’ target audiences inform the animalization. Whereas Mercury’s 1975 Cougar commercial claimed to have “civilized the big cat,” Buick’s 1967 commercial was turning the Wildcat loose.

1965-66: The Pontiac GTO “Goat”

You may already be aware that the Pontiac GTO’s nickname was “the Goat”; but did you know that GM made a commercial for the GTO featuring a large cat? Here it is:

What do you make of this strange double animalization??

Remember the old Ford commercial with the seagulls, the one with skeevy yesteryear innuendo in it? I think it weirds us out because the commercial’s innuendos were addressed to male customers, but it was talking about women as though they weren’t listening or were not sharp enough to catch the drift. Either way, it essentially implied how little women’s opinions mattered.

In this GTO commercial the animalization is part of an advance from the old Ford approach. Here, the GTO is figured as a “tiger,” which appeals to a male customer base. However, everything said to that ideal male customer is actually appealing to the females in their lives—to wives, to daughters, or to wives those guys treated like daughters: “If she insists on driving your GTO, tell her: ‘If you want a tiger, you have to take care of it!’” (0:46) Parental as this sounds, it’s a logical step beyond Ford’s seagull commercial. (But it’s still a step short of the old Secret deodorant slogan: “Strong enough for a man… but made for a woman.”)

The superimposed tiger’s face at the end of the first commercial focuses attention on the car’s features, drawing a parallel to animal body parts. We can see a faciality, which is present in most cars, in two headlights—well, four on a GTO; but they’re localized in two places—and a grill, which on many cars looks like a mouth of gritted teeth.

In these old ads, it’s strange to see a GTO—the car’s nickname was “the Goat”—figured as a large cat.⁵ This wasn’t a one-off, either, as you can see in this commercial for 1966:

If we think about where the tiger appears in this ad, what’s the animalization of this car doing?

I suspect Pontiac recognized the strangeness of tiger imagery in ads for a car nicknamed “Goat.” This ad makes GM seem inattentive to the way their customers talked about their cars. So when the GTO was reintroduced in 2006, the advertising embraced not only the “Goat” nickname but all the baggage that the goat (the animal) had accrued in the Christian world, as we see in this teaser ad that played up the unholiness of a Corvette 6.0 L V-8 jammed into a body the size of a Cavalier. A six-point-oh-liter V-8 = “6-point Goat”; and six, as we all know, is the Devil’s number.

To return to the older GTOs, Pontiac had a habit of adding a central, nose-like beak, making their cars’ front ends also appear hawkish or bird-like. In addition to their tiger ads and “Goat” nickname, they shared a birdlikeness with other Pontiacs. And this birdlikeness was underscored by one Pontiac model’s name in particular: the Firebird.

1967-2002: The Pontiac Firebird

The Firebird disrupted the automobile market in 1967 by drawing attention to the widespread animalization of vehicles. The advertising history suggests that 1967 was the apogee of automobile animalization, with a veritable menagerie of animalized cars on the market; and this commercial for the then-new Firebird alludes to all of the other animalizations in commercial advertising:

The reference to “cats” is obvious—we’ve just seen what that’s talking about. The reference to “horses” clearly points to the Mustang. “Fish” refers to the Plymouth Barracuda, which was first released in 1964.

This commercial is resurrecting a very old way of thinking about Kingdom Animalia, one that can be traced clear back to Plato’s Timaeus. The Renaissance view of the cosmos—the scala natura or Great Chain of Being—supposed a hierarchy within the animal kingdom. At the bottom of the hierarchy were “beasts,” that is, land animals; above them, fish; and above all, birds.⁶ We see the same order in Plato’s Timaeus:

[God] went on to complete [the unfinished world], moulding it after the nature of the pattern [i.e., the one in His mind]. So many forms then as Mind perceived to exist in the ideal animal, according to their variety and multitude, such kinds and such a number did He think fit that this universe should possess. These are fourfold: first the race of the heavenly gods; next the winged tribes whose path is in the air; third whatso dwells in the water; and fourth that which goes upon dry land.⁷

By this logic, flying animals—in this case, the Firebird—are superior to swimming or walking/running animals.

What is a “Firebird,” anyway? It certainly connotes the Phoenix, the legendary creature that burns up and then rises, newly born, from its own ashes. We should read the next commercial, an ad for the 1997 Firebird, with that image in mind.

Check the color of the car and the background music. This Firebird ad is the product of a decade that witnessed the skyrocketing popularity of black vocalists, including Whitney Houston, Ray Charles, Michael Jackson, Prince, Mariah Carey, Darius Rucker, Snoop Dog (who would later change his animal name to Snoop Lion), and Tupac Shakur, to name a few. In fact, based on the timing of this ad, I’d argue it was an homage to Ella Fitzgerald, who died during the summer of 1996 and was famous for many songs, among them, “Bye-Bye Blackbird.” Note the lyrics of the ad’s background music. With Phoenix imagery in mind, the black Firebird is deployed here as a symbol of hope for her rebirth, if not literally, then perhaps through a new generation of black musicians or a new rendition of “Bye-Bye Blackbird.”

This ad almost reads as a conciliatory “Yes” to Rodney King’s appeal, “Can we all get along?” amid the riots in Los Angeles in 1992. It certainly seems heartfelt. But why is the dude making a fast getaway in the Firebird a white guy?? This is a study in the politics of animalization. If you’re the person or one of the people in power, you can put on and take off animality at will. You can also decide to share it with those you perceive as having less power than you. But when the powerful put on animality, others may see that as appropriation. And what the powerful intend as “sharing” may be experienced by others as “being put upon.” Even when it’s meant kindly, as an homage, animalizing either oneself or others is a risky business.⁸

The following year Pontiac released perhaps the grossest ad ever, for the Trans Am:

This ad is “gross” in the sense of “gross anatomy”—it’s so corporeal, what with all the simulated devouring and digestion, the burp, and the leftover husk of the consumed red car, its roof pillars sticking up like a rib cage. Although the ad mentions “Firebird,” it emphasizes “Trans Am.” And the car’s behavior isn’t birdlike, it’s bestial—especially the burp. (I’ve tried to identify the devoured red car, but I came up empty so if you know what it is, I’m interested.)

The Darwinist implications of this ad make it easy to see why Dwight Schrute drives a Firebird in The Office; and if you read the comments on the YouTube video, for whatever reason, this grossest of all car ads has a loyal following.

1989-1998: The Last Buick Skylarks

Buick had a reputation for making large cars. One exception, though, was the Skylark, which was made in three waves: 1953-1954; 1961-1972; and 1975-1998. As you can tell, that last production wave was also the longest-running. And I bet it’s because Buick marketed to women. Check out the role that animals played in this marketing:

This commercial pushes all the right connotative buttons. The Skylark is “a little limousine” (0:11). When it pulls up to the curb behind a regular limousine, who are the VIPs escorted to the car? The pets—two freshly groomed dogs. In fact, the VIP in the regular limousine is a finely manicured poodle.

The old aphorism that people look like their pets is certainly at play here, since this woman is as well-groomed as her dogs. But the logic also transfers to the car. According to her narration, it’s “very stylish,” “smooth,” and “powerful.” And since she’s carrying a flower basket when she enters the vehicle outside of Flowers by Judy, we have to ask: is this Judy? It’s subtle, but the setting suggests either she’s the owner of a successful business, or else she’s stylish, smooth, and powerful enough to afford fresh flowers and newly groomed pets. (Not coincidentally, at my first job I worked with a middle-aged woman named Judy who drove a Buick Skylark.)

The appeal then is to single, professional women: buy this affordable but luxurious car and you’ll be comfortable—possibly enough comfortable enough to afford companionship.

Four years later, Buick would sell the Skylark to a younger, more ambitious female driver. Let’s take a look:

What did you see that you’ve seen before? I noticed the same carwash-is-sexy logic we saw in the ‘67 Wildcat commercial.

By today’s standards the subtleties of this commercial are actually kind of offensive. “What do busy, professional, single women want? A groom, of course! And this car will get you one. In fact, it will get you more than one!” Not seeing it? Maybe it helps to be working with the etymology of “groom”:

1300: “a man, a male adult, sometimes with implication of low social status”

1340: “a person (originally a man) who is employed to take care of horses”

1572: “a man on his wedding day; a man who is getting married or is newly married; a bridegroom”⁹

This commercial effectively says, “Buy this Buick. The men will work for you and your car-animal. (But only the non-white men.)” The woman in this commercial doesn’t sound Southern, but the vision of what her life could be is a warmed-over version of the Old South, or even of medieval Europe. The fair woman genteelly narrates while her beloved steed-machine luxuriates in a bath, cared for by exotic-looking grooms. So although there are no visible references to animals here other than the Skylark name, by rendering the car wash crew as “grooms,” the commercial effectively animalizes the car, rendering the professional woman recommending it a noblewoman. If the point was to elevate women, or to avoid talking down to them, Buick overdoes it in this ad by subscribing to the logic of a zero-sum game in which elevation for women requires the subjugation of others.

In Skylark advertising Buick was somewhat schizophrenic on this matter, though. Check out the pandery-ness of this ad:

I realize it’s impolite to ask a woman’s age, but this gal is—what? High-school-aged? College-aged? But that’s the problem: this ad infantilizes any woman old enough to drive. “This car is your teddy bear. It’s like your mama’s hug.” As a college professor, I work with women between 18 and 25 years old. Not many of them—not even the ones whose style choices make them look younger than that—want someone else to infantilize them the way this commercial infantilizes this woman.

2014: The Chevrolet Equinox

I know, I know—“Equinox” isn’t an animal name. But check this one out:

In case you’re wondering, yes, I show these commercials in my classes, particularly in my Philosophy seminar, Thinking About Animals. I’m always interested in what my students have to say after watching this one because, without fail, someone is perturbed because they feel manipulated. This commercial tugs heartstrings. But it’s a car commercial, and it makes them angry that something so maudlin can make them feel… well, anything. How’s it work?

I know what I think. This time, it’s your turn to weigh in. Feel free to leave a comment below…

…or, if you haven’t yet, become a subscriber and let the other subscribers know what you think about this ad in the Salvage discussion thread!

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I confess, as I wrote this post it increasingly felt like a dutiful treatment of so many data points. But the sheer weight of that, of having to analyze so much—and remember: this is only one of the Big Three American auto makers—should underscore how pervasive the animalization of our vehicles has been. And look at the length of the historical arc represented here. GM’s animalized car ads go back at least seventy years. These commercials are so old, plentiful, and various, how can the notion that our machines are somehow animal be anything other than common sense?

“Where’s the harm, though?” you ask? I think the real harm is twofold. First, humans have a tendency to replicate anything they find in nature in a vain attempt to perfect it, to turn it to human purposes. In fact, that tendency, more than anything else, might be the defining feature of modernity. If there’s a God, the hubris of this human tendency is an affront to God’s creativity and possibly a subversion of the goodness inherent in the way God ordered the world and its inhabitants.

Second, as we’ve seen now in both GM’s and Ford’s car commercials, animals are inextricably twisted up in human commerce, politics, and culture—often by no choice of their own. Were some over-human species to do something similar to us, we’d have our objections; and just because we don’t sense animals’ objections to this kind of thing doesn’t mean they don’t have any. But even if they don’t, we should be at least a little haunted by the assumptions about animals we’re inculcating in ourselves and in new generations by allowing this animal-driven sales strategy to continue. Too often, as in the Flowers by Judy Skylark commercial, animals begin to look like products, like accessories to human life, when they’re conscripted for marketing purposes. Too often, as in the tiger-ization of the Pontiac GTO, we tell each other that “If you buy this product it will give you the qualities of this animal”; and the longing to appropriate the traits of other species in that way is a very old longing, and is usually motivated by a desire for power. If you don’t believe me, read Homer’s Iliad.

I’m going to do at least one more analysis post, this time focusing on the Mopar family of auto marques (Dodge, Chrysler, Plymouth, Jeep); I may write a post about any of this year’s Superbowl commercials, just to see what’s happening really recently. And then we need to start to consider what animals are, what they’re like, and what they were made to be.

It’s going to be a good year.

Dr. Aaron M. Long is a Lecturer in English at a flagship state university, and in Philosophy at a historied regional art school. He has published articles in Twentieth-Century Literature, The Nautilus, and Science Fiction Film & Television, among others. You can find him on Twitter (yeah, yeah, on X) or LinkedIn, and his website is here.

1. Robert A. Fria, Mustang Genesis: The Birth of the Pony Car (Jefferson, NC: , 2010), 83.

2. Fria, 83.

3. Fria, 83.

4. Sure it’s a stereotype. But I’ve known three airplane pilots in my lifetime—a woman and two men—and they drove, respectively, an Infiniti G-35, a BMW 3-Series, and a 1976 Corvette. And the fact that they’re all airplane pilots matters as well, because an airplane moves faster than a helicopter and a drone doesn’t put its pilot’s body through the same thrills that either an airplane or a helicopter do.

5. Which is it? Pick a species, people! Obviously, “Goat” is an anagram of the letters and sounds of “GTO” and as such it comes off as kind of an illiterate nickname. Like, “No, man, can’t you read? It says ‘GTO,’ not ‘GOaT.’” And then there’s the commercial’s offhanded remark that “Frankly, Pontiac didn’t intend ‘GTO’ to stand for ‘Girls Take Over’; but it’s something you tiger owners have to guard against.” (0:11) So what does “GTO” stand for? “Gran Tourismo Omologato.” That’s Italian for “Homologated Grand Touring” car. Homologation is the process by which a car, track, or other apparatus is approved by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, an organization founded in Paris in 1904 to represent the special interests of car drivers as countries modernized their infrastructure. As it turns out, from 1964 on, the GTO was homologated for racing in Europe. It was a feature! But the conflation of the nickname “Goat” with tiger imagery makes this car something of a chimera.

6. See, for example, Didacus Vilades’ drawing, “The Great Chain of Being,” in Rhetorica Christiana, 1579. At some point I’ll write a post on this, because the scala natura, as the Great Chain was also known, deeply influenced Renaissance thinking about animals and its shadow looms even still over postmodernity.

7. Plato, The Timaeus of Plato, ed. R.D. Archer-Hind (New York, NY: MacMillan and Co., 1888), 131.

8. It’s also worth pointing out that, for a long time, films and television have associated black drivers with GM land yachts. In the early twenty-first century the Fast and the Furious franchise, xXx, and Gone in Sixty Seconds have all perpetuated this association. It’s also evident in the relatively recent music video for “John Muir” by Schoolboy Q (MAJOR bad language), which is intriguing because it makes the car itself the witness to the misadventures of its occupants one California night.

9. “groom, n.,” The Oxford English Dictionary, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/groom_n1?tab=meaning_and_use#2524968. Accessed 10 February 2024.