Photo Caption: If there’s one thing better than a ridiculous sales gimmick, it’s a satirical take on a ridiculous sales gimmick, such as this doctored advertisement.
I think every event had a co-pilot, but that was a long time ago. One I remember was a table waiter sort of thing, where the driver drove, and the passenger held a tray of drinks out the window. Obviously, the object was to be the fastest one with the most drinks left, and each spilled drink had a certain so-many-second penalty. A great idea on paper, and it went pretty well for some. Unfortunately for me, I got dealt an all-too-typical Saskatchewan hand of doom when the wind took the entire tray out of the hand of my co-pilot. What’s a guy who has been fully penalized supposed to do? Floor it, obviously. It helped, but not enough to win. More difficult yet was the blindfolded driver challenge, a challenge so difficult that it requires an area exactly like that, with soft ditches and no hazards. The driver drove with taped-up goggles, and the passenger spouted off “a little to the left” and other helpful sayings that felt more like grass than pavement. Even at low speed, blindfolded driving is fairly impossible, or so I thought until I recently learned that Dodge sort of used it as a sales pitch. I was in a Chevy that day, apparently ill-equipped.
The car was the 1952 Dodge Coronet, equipped with the new Oriflow Ride. What was Oriflow Ride, you ask? I asked the same question, and the nearest thing I could find for an answer was that it was either just a marketing gimmick or some sort of magic shock absorbers. Remember the rich Corinthian leather from about two-and-a-half decades later? Same gimmicky company. Advertised as “taking the bumps out of bumps” along with a handful of other slogans, it was said that if you were a blindfolded passenger in a Dodge, that you couldn’t see the potholes or feel them, that everything was smooth and even. In a hostage situation, a Dodge would have been seemingly ideal, as the hostage wouldn’t be able to recognize the rough country road, though being bound and gagged might cancel out any of the added creature comforts. My favourite part of this advertisement is the satire that has come out of it over the years, such as the doctored version above.
Obviously, Dodge never intended for the driver of the car to be blindfolded, but it makes for a great laugh. Looking back, I could have mopped the floor with one in the blindfolded driver competition. There’d be no feeling of grass versus track in the Dodge, where my Chevy felt every pebble, bottle cap, and ant it drove over.
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