“Hey Fred, did you see that special on Channel 6 last night?” “You mean the Edsel show? Wow, that was the greatest! Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Rosemary Clooney, all together on the same show!” “Yeah, and Bob Hope showed up too. It looked live, not that crummy kinescope we always get. Too bad the car is such a pig.” “Looks like an Oldsmobile that sucked a lemon.” “Like Frank Sinatra would drive an Edsel. What a joke.”
We all know the Edsel as the big failure, the record-setting money loser, the unbelievably ugly bulgemobile. So it’s hard to imagine a time when no one had ever seen an Edsel. And everyone wanted to. “E-Day”, September 4, 1957, was coming. American culture reigned supreme in the world, Detroit reigned supreme in American culture, and the fall tradition of the “all new” models was eagerly anticipated by every man and boy. This year, a month ahead of all the other new cars, something really big was coming from Ford, something mysterious, a car unlike any other. The car of the future, the car that would change everything. They said so in the papers, the magazines, on TV, everywhere you looked. E-Day was coming.
The hype was spectacular. Edsel ad man Fairfax Cone of the Foote, Cone & Belding agency (“Aren’t you glad you use Dial? Dont you wish everybody did?”) created an unprecedented amount of excitement and anticipation. Two-page ads in Life started in July. “Early this week, a group of big automotive carriers cleared the yards of six giant U.S. plants and rolled out into the night. Balling the jack. Because their steel racks held something they had never held before. They were loaded with a new kind of car. … ‘Man, would I like to have one of those.'” Super-secret Edsels, covered and hidden like flying saucers. E-Day was coming.
Advertising and ad men were riding high in the Fifties. Life was good in post-Depression post-war America. Wide, smooth new highways. See the USA! Plenty of money around, and plenty of exciting new cars to spend it on. They were all there on your new TV! In the commercials and in the shows, everyone drove wonderful new cars.
In Detroit, planned obsolescence was the business model. Crank out big cars loud and fast. Don’t spend too much on quality, it’ll be obsolete in three years anyway, once the next set of style changes and gizmos comes out. Besides, advertising has become scientific! Ad men know the psychology of the American consumer, his eight essential needs that can never be completely satisfied. Status, excitement, security, these are buttons we can push as needed. Now with the power of television, we have their eyes and ears and minds every night. Finally, E-Day is here!
Heavy Turnout to see Edsels Ames (Iowa) Tribune, September 5, 1957, “A crowd estimated at some 10,000 people turned out Wednesday to view the unveiling of the completely new Edsel automobile at Larry Peterson Edsel Sales here… The viewers consumed 45 gallons of coffee and 54 dozen doughnuts during the day, Peterson said.”
The entire 1960 population of Ames, Iowa, was 27,003. 2.5 million Americans poured into Edsel showrooms on E-Day. What they saw was a bunch of ’58 Fords and Mercurys with horse-collar grilles (classic!), push-button (Teletouch!) transmissions and weird (Rolling Dome!) speedometers. Millions looked, very few bought. After ten days it was a clear catastrophe. Ultimately Ford lost $400 million on the Edsel – $3 billion in 2010 dollars.
But the show must go on…..A month later, just a week after Sputnik shocked the country, Ford put on a major TV special, The Edsel Show. Sunday night, October 13, 1957, it preempted Ed Sullivan on CBS, entirely sponsored by Ford, starring Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Louis Armstrong and Rosemary Clooney.
This was a top-quality production. Only three Edsel commercials, about 2 1/2 minutes each, came between some of the best jazz and pop music ever seen on television. The Edsel Show was a great success, with 50 million viewers, 30% of the whole US population! Too bad nobody cared about the car.
Rosemary Clooney said the afternoon of the show, “I came out of the CBS Building, up those little steps to the street where my purple Edsel was waiting, like the Normandie in drydock. Mr. Ford was right behind me, heading for his Edsel. I opened the door of my car and the handle came off. I turned to him, holding it out to him. “About your car…””
Unlike the Edsel, the Edsel Show was in fact something the world had never seen, something that did change the world forever. It was the first network entertainment program to be videotaped.
Hard to believe in the age of pocket camcorders, but the networks operated for a decade, and sent programs from coast to coast, without any way to record TV. Some sitcoms like “I Love Lucy” were filmed, but everything else was live. Live in the East that is. On the West Coast, all they could do was film the live show right off a monitor screen, rush the film to be developed, and run the film three hours later. These were called kinescopes, they were expensive, and they looked terrible. In 1956 the gang at Ampex in what’s now called the Silicon Valley, developed the first broadcast-quality video tape recorder.
Bing and the gang actually did the show live for the east at 4pm Pacific, and the west got a crisp, clear videotape at 7, which they all watched at a big party at Bing’s house. You can watch the entire Edsel Show at the Internet Archive. Between the solid gold musicians and the solid lead advertising, I recommend it.
Postscript
After such a catastrophe, you would think anyone proposing another E-Day-type promotion at Ford would get a swift bullet in the neck. Not Lee Iacocca. Less than seven years after E-Day came another big date: April 17, 1964. Huge anticipation. Crowds in the showrooms. M-Day went a little better.
So the car was so ugly it has to be transported covered up… Once the cover is off, so is the appeal…
I guess Edsels did not fail due to lack of promotion, it failed despite extensive promotion!
No wonder the brand is synonymous with failure.
Der Bingle was a pioneer in videotape. The old tale is that he wanted to be able to do his programs at a reasonable hour and be in his easy chair in the evening!
Even his radio shows were usually pre-recorded, which was far from universal in the 1940s. Jack Benny occasionally joked about it.
I wish I could order a ’65 Mustang my way now…
A very nice historical piece. I had no idea that this was the first use of videotape in network television. I have not yet had a chance to view the clips, but look forward to it. “Adult pop” music of the 1950s was quite good, and has aged better than most of the early rock and roll (imho).
So many reasons for the disaster that was Edsel. I still maintain that other than the unfortunate front end, the car was fairly attractive, by the standards of 1958. Although these were not so dramatic as the Forward Look Mopars, they were certainly better looking than most of what was in the GM showrooms that year.
But alas, the Edsel was Ford’s “Bridge too Far” in its epic 1950s growth spurt.
The myth is that the Edsel failed solely from the vertical ‘horsecollar’ grille. But, reality was the ‘mid price’ cars were saturated, and there was a recession. So, suburban car buyers went, ‘ehh’, and kept their 1955’s.
Also, Robert McNamara was eager to kill the whole E-Car project, and Mercury dealers too.
The Edsel was a really great idea – in 1954, when it was first proposed. Had they brought it out in the boom year of 1955, it would have sold gangbusters. Had they gotten it out for the 1956 model year, it’d probably have done really well. Had they gotten it out for the 1957 model year (with the 1958 styling) it would have deflected a lot of the Chrysler ‘Forward Look’ juggernaut. However, 1958 was the ‘Eisenhower Recession’ when things suddenly went tits-up for the first time since the end of WWII. People immediately panicked and stopped spending (sound familiar?). Those who did spend suddenly found a new frugality (sound familiar?).
Some of it was probably brought on by a growing fatigue over the more and more outlandish Detroit stylings, yet for 1958 the Edsel wasn’t that bad looking a car. Compare it to a 58 Buick or Oldsmobile, or a 59 GM-anything. It starts to border on reserved, and at least the styling was a complete package, not just a load of cliches dumped on the previous year’s car.
Plus there’s this little matter of internal Ford politics: In 1954 there was a clear cut plan. Four years later the plan had been so internally riddled that it was neither recognizable or a plan. This was the kind of internal politics that Ford only got rid of in the last 5-6 years – by bringing in a complete outsider who had no tolerance for the long-standing internal fiefdoms.
The Edsel was doomed to failure. And the car itself was only about a quarter of the reason for that failure.
Yup. It was originally supposed to bridge the gap between Mercury and Lincoln, which was substantial, and give Ford more dealers. Then it was supposed to replace Mercury, which would then move upmarket. Finally, it ended up overlapping Mercury, so instead of expanding Ford’s market reach, it just bifurcated it.
Also, the ’59 Edsel was pretty normal-looking, as ’59 domestic cars went, and it still didn’t sell. If the ’58s had looked like the ’59, they might have gone over better, but I suspect not much.
Also interesting is how Edsel retrenched for 1959. In 1958, there were 4 models. The lower two shared the Ford Fairlane body shell, and the upper two shared a body shell with the Mercury (which had a unique body for 1957-58).
In 1959, the 57-58 Fairlane body disappeared. The Edsel was reduced to two models, both of which shared the Ford body (which I believe to have been a minor re-work of the 57-58 Mercury body, while the 1959-60 Mercury got yet another body shell).
It is also interesting that while Cadillac had to share its C body with the biggest Buick (and Oldsmobile?) the Lincoln kept its unique body all to itself. This may have been partly for practical reasons, as the Lincoln was of unit construction (as was the T-Bird) while the rest of the line remained body-on-frame. So, for 1957-59, I count four unique body shells (excluding T-Bird), and none of them sold in significant numbers except for the two used by the Ford.
Yup. The irony is that GM’s body-sharing program for 1950 was part of what inspired Ford’s E-car program. Ford realized that if they shared more inner body structure, the way GM did, they could add the extra models they wanted for less than they were currently paying for fewer bodies. However, it didn’t work out that way at all.
The reason the Lincoln remained separate was definitely because of its unitized construction. Wixom was the only Ford plant then set up for unit body construction, so both the Thunderbird and the Lincoln were built there. Some division execs weren’t happy about that, but neither car by itself was produced in large enough numbers to make the Wixom plant economically viable.
JP, I believe the ’59 Edsels used the new ’59 Ford bodies, though otherwise you’re spot-on.
Very well said, Sykes. Your commentary describes much of the trials and tribulations about the Edsel affair. I am an Edsel fanatic, and, born too late in time. I wish I was a teen when the Edsel came out. Here are a few book covers on what went wrong with Ford’s “Executive Car” plan. The first 2 are by C. Gayle Warnock, the third is Thomas E. Bonsall’s book “Disaster in Dearborn, and describes the Corporate Soap Opera of the Edsel. These are all excellent reads!
The Edsel is certainly no beauty, but I’m not seeing where it’s any uglier than a 1958 Oldsmobile or Buick. That year’s Oldsmobile, in particular, is gruesome, but it actually moved up a notch in the sales standings to fourth.
The Chrysler and DeSoto were much more attractive, but their sales collapsed in 1958. Chrysler barely outsold the Edsel, but the Edsel easily outsold the DeSoto. And their quality was just as bad as the quality of the Edsel.
In the long run, the Edsel debacle HELPED Ford. The goal behind the Edsel was to give the corporation enough divisions to match GM across the board. (It’s worth noting that in 1958 an all-new, huge Lincoln debuted that was aimed squarely at Cadillac. It flopped, too.)
It’s apparent, in retrospect, that the old Sloan divisional structure was obsolete. The car that started the process of undermining that structure debuted in 1958. This was the four-seat Thunderbird. In a terrible year for the old medium-price cars, the Thunderbird sold well. Even more importantly, the Thunderbird proved that one of the low-priced three could sell a fairly expensive car, provided it had the right style and features.
Robert McNamara championed the four-seat Thunderbird in the face of corporate skepticism, and pushed to kill the Edsel. He was right, so, whatever his other faults, Ford partisans should be thanking him for his decisions during this time.
By the 1980s, the Sloan structure was hindering, not helping, GM. The need to keep several divisions stocked with product was a major handicap for GM. Cost pressures, meanwhile, prevented GM from giving meaningful distinctions to each division’s offerings. By the late 1990s, GM’s divisions were competing more with themselves than anyone else for the same segment of the market.
Thanks to the Edsel disaster, Ford never strayed from its Ford and Lincoln-Mercury divisional structure. And it didn’t forget that the Ford Division was its bread-and-butter. If the Edsel had succeeded, Ford would have been faced with a GM-like dilemma by the 1980s, too.
The Chrysler sales collapse in ’58 was due to quality control, not styling. Word got out real fast that the ’57’s were badly built, even by the standards of that time.
I agree with pretty much all of this. In hindsight, Ford Motor Company was better off without Edsel. For the same reasons, Chrysler Corporation was better off moving forward without DeSoto. The trend against the Sloan System started by the ’58 Thunderbird would be taken much further once the market began to subdivide after 1960 (compacts, intermediates, ponycars, personal-luxury coupes, subcompacts, minivans, SUVs, crossovers…). In this world, it no longer made sense to have several brands like GM did. Entering the post-1960 world with fewer brands turned out to be a good thing for Ford and Chrysler (although “less bad” might be a better way to put it).
i had no idea about the edsel show; fantastic talent assembled on one stage. i also had no idea that bing & pops ever performed together. this being the first videotaped program makes a lot of sense, if you know something about the history of videotape. ampex is credited with inventing it but a lot of the r&d was actually done by bing crosby enterprises. they had been working for a few years on the concept, modifying ampex audio recorders for the purpose. i believe they eventually partnered with ampex and beat rca to the market.
the problem was that the tape would have to move at something like 1500 inches/second in order to record picture. the breakthrough came when a student intern at ampex named ray dolby (yes that dolby) came up with the idea of using a helical scan of a wider tape running at a slower speed.
amazing how all this stuff ties together.
http://www.kingoftheroad.net/edsel/edselshow3.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helical_scan
p.s. i trained on ampex 2000 vtr’s early in my career and the design and construction of these things was incredible. here’s a picture of one taping a johnny carson special on a boat!
As a former video tape operator, yes, the quads were amazing beasts, and complicated to operate. We used to imagine a future with small digital recording devices, but it would have been hard to image being able to generate video from cell phones.
Our station also used a competing 2″ format machine, the helical scan IVC 9000:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IVC_9000
Amazing machine; a more advanced format, and with superb air tape handling, as well as using the expensive 2″ tape more economically. I still operate them in my dreams at night.
Have you ever seen High Society? Satchmo and Der Bingle do “Now You Has Jazz,” which is essential.
There was a CD compilation in the nineties called Bing Crosby and His Jazz Friends that includes collaborations between Bing and various folks, including Louis Armstrong, Louis Jordan, Jack Teagarden, and Connee Boswell. Well worth seeking out, if you like such things.
“Millions looked, very few bought. After ten days it was a clear catastrophe.”
That’s something I’ve never really thought about — how soon after its introduction it became apparent that the Edsel was going to be a flop. Was it really only ten days?
So say the histories. Dealers had to have known very early, as all that traffic turned into very few sales.
I learned most from “The other fifties: interrogating midcentury American icons”, by Joel Foreman, which turned up on Google Books:
http://books.google.com/books?id=nLsywaQ0qtMC&pg=PA35
There’s lots more juicy history there.
I think it’s like movies — there are occasionally situations where something takes a while to find an audience, then becomes a hit, but generally if something does poorly at the outset, it’s likely to be downhill from there.
“Some sitcoms like “I Love Lucy” were filmed, but everything else was live. Live in the East that is. On the West Coast, all they could do was film the live show right off a monitor screen, rush the film to be developed, and run the film three hours later. These were called kinescopes, they were expensive, and they looked terrible.”
Straying a bit off topic, but the wikipedia page for “I Love Lucy” has some interesting information on why and how it came to be filmed. In a nutshell: The network and sponsor wanted the show to be performed on the East Coast and kinescoped to the West Coast. Ball and Arnaz did not want to leave their home in California, at least in part because they were planning to start a family. Although performing on the West Coast and kinescoping to the East Coast was not completely unheard of, it was frowned upon because the networks wanted the much larger (at that time) East Coast audience to get the better-quality live broadcast, not the kinescope. Filming would allow the whole country to see a better-quality broadcast, but was significantly more expensive. Ball and Arnaz had to agree to take a pay cut in order to get the network to go for filming. As part of the deal, however, they were also able to negotiate a greater stake of ownership and control over the future use of the filmed episodes. Filming also created an issue in that a film operation would essentially be treated as a movie studio operation for purposes of contracts with labor unions (employees who worked on filming were in different unions from those who worked on television broadcasts). Ball and Arnaz therefore had to create their own film studio, Desilu.
The upshot of this: when syndicated re-reuns came on the scene, Ball and Arnaz found themselves sitting on a gold mine. Most early network shows had disappeared into the ether, or only existed as low-quality kinescopes. But Ball and Arnaz had high-quality film of every episode of their show.
I agree that the Edsel wasn’t all that bad looking, in the context of other horrible looking ’58s. In fact as I kept seeing Edsels in my research for this, the design started growing on me. I once modified a photo, replacing the thick inner chrome ring and lettering with simple vertical lines, like the horizontal flanking grilles. I thought it looked nice and classic.
The massive hype is what turned the Edsel into a national laughingstock. Real technological change was coming so thick and fast in the fifties, Edsel hype led people to expect something truly radical, some sort of atomic, radar-guided rocketship. Remember the Segway ten years ago?
Edsel’s E-Day was an epic fail, the corporate equivalent to “Hey everybody, watch this!”
I remember seeing a news-magazine style show about the Edsel, in early 80’s. It featured portions of a long form commercial with the theme song ‘Sell the Car’. Long winded, and over the top, but saying, ”when your ready to sell, the Edsel will have good resale”.
Similar to the 1980 IH Scout ads with 5 year warranty.
The financial loss from the Edsel wasn’t as great as some say. The money they spent on new factories eventually paid off in the boom years of the 60’s. It was capacity that hd already in place becaus of the Edsel.
Can’t help but to notice that the Germans are where we were in the late ’50s. Ever heavier and more gadget laden over-styled cars that age like milk is there business model, and they’ve been at it about a decade now.
Teasers never die. This web ad just showed up at the bottom of my CC page:
“2013 Dodge Dart is coming!”
http://www.dodge.com/dart/
Forget about the cars, but I’ve also worked with the old 2″ quad tape machines as well – back in the ’80’s, when they were on the way out. The 1″C format was top dog at the time. I spent a lot of time with them, and I can still thread one in my sleep. Nowadays we get most of our stuff as downloads or on hard drives, with the odd HDCAM or HDCAM-SR tape thrown in. No threading involved – just set up the proper frame rate and re-boot the deck. Make sure you have the machine hooked up to the proper reference signal. Yikes. I’m talking about work on my day off. The music lives on…there aren’t many of the cars left. I’ll take a truck with a straight six and a four speed.