If an anthropologist from another planet were to read Yasutoshi Ikuta's Cruise-O-Matic: Automobile Advertising from the 1950s and use it as a study guide to Earth, he would be convinced that humans are always hilariously happy, and tall and beautiful. All females are long-legged, slender, and go very few places without an extravagant costume including a hat and short white gloves. Males are tall and broad-shouldered, dress impeccably and seem to continually dangle small metal objects in front of the females. Further study would show the metal "baubles" access control of large, low-slung, powerful machines called "automobiles," around which life on Earth revolves and evolves.
Ikuta is a native of Japan who is fascinated with the art of automobile advertising and has done an admirable job of gathering the classics of this genre from mid-20th Century America into a full-color collection that reminds one of Leave it to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, Ed Sullivan, and the great "picture" magazines: Look, Life, and Saturday Evening Post.
The ideal America that advertising agencies created to go with the automobiles that these ads were designed to sell is as interesting as the cars themselves, particularly to those who lived in the era and have memories of the reality to compare to the promises.
There is a certain sense of nostalgia wrought by colored renderings featuring three-ton Hudsons, gleaming Nashes, and the beefy, chrome-laden, tail-finned offerings from Ford, General Motors and Dodge that perhaps no other set of media could evoke as well as these ads. Beautiful mothers in waist-cinching outfits and heels load adoring children into station wagons. Distinguished, middle-aged gentlemen dressed in tuxedos and graying at the temples offer Cadillac keys to jewel-bedecked younger women. Young couples and happy foursomes laugh their way across the pages in convertibles that match their outfits perfectly.
The nostalgia is no more real than the situations in the ads themselves. It is interesting to note that in almost all of the ads, the use of photography is eschewed in favor of drawings and paintings. It is apparent that none of the models or situations are any more real than the artists' imaginations. All of the subjects might live in the same town -- even in the same neighborhood … except those in the Cadillac, Lincoln and Thunderbird ads, who live in the upscale neighborhoods and throw lavish parties for their friends who also drive Cadillacs, Thunderbirds and Lincolns and never park them in the garage, even though they have the standard two-car model.
This is a fun book to read, though the reading is mostly confined to the ads themselves. There is a small section of text written in Ikuta's distinctively Japanese voice that outlines the American auto industry of the '50s, including a table showing production numbers of America car manufacturers in 1955, broken down by "badges." He also chronicles the demise of smaller carmakers, like Kaiser-Frazer, Willys, Nash, Packard and Studebaker and the initial invasion of cars from the newly rebuilt factories of Europe and Japan.
As an anthropologist's guide or a reality check on life in the mid-century United States, Cruise-O-Matic is more an amusement than an accurate portrayal, and might best contain a disclaimer that the culture depicted is not a working culture. As a source of beautiful portrayals of the American automobile and the combined visions of Detroit and Madison Avenue during the golden era between 1950 and 1959, however, it is a delight.
-- Sandy Compton
