There’s a huge collection of Mopar dealer education film strips out there on YouTube, and they lean to the corny side. Oh but not this groovy gem. Hey mister Dodge salesman, are you hip to the lingo of selling performance?
CC Vintage Film Strip: 1970 Dodge Scat Pack – The Lingo of Selling Performance
– Posted on April 20, 2018
The 1950’s announcer type trying to sound smooth using the late 60’s/early 70’s lingo is the icing on the cake with this promo film…
I’m thinking Les Nessman from the old WKRP in Cincinnati sitcom, or maybe Mr. Burns from The Simpsons in describing one of his attack dogs: “I remember when [Crippler] bagged his first hippie. That young man didn’t think it was too ‘groovy'”.
Be that as it may, I once read that the sixties were an auto industry marketing man’s wet dream (Jim Wangers from Pontiac’s ad agency being the best example). The year this filmstrip came out, 1970, would be the pinnacle of the musclecar era. Steep insurance surcharges were already starting to take a huge bite out of musclecar sales, and it was only going to spiral rapidly downhill from there.
It would be interesting to see a Plymouth filmstrip of the Rapid Transit System.
Being 17 in 1970 and hearing this fellow talking about being hip makes me roll my eyes as in you gotta be kidding…
Fun … but I couldn’t take more than a few minutes of it. I was only 13 in 1970, but I don’t remember anyone cool talking like that. Still, it’s better that they’re talking about performance options than infotainment and lane-departure.
I can die in peace now. This is the best thing I have seen on the internet, ever! I forgot all about the filmstrips with the “beep” to get the machine to advance to the next frame. That seemed so fancy in elementary school.
The “beep” was to tell the person running the projector to manually turn the knob to advance to the next frame. It was kind of an honor in elementary school to be the one selected by the teacher to turn the knob on the film strip projector. Machines that would automatically advance at the beep didn’t come along until later. My school got the ones that advanced automatically in the late 1980s, IIRC.
The automatic ones didn’t respond to a high-pitched beep, but to a 50-Hz pulse much less obtrusive, but readily audible just over the machine’s bulb-cooling fan if you knew to listen for it. The cassette tape ir record that went with the filmstrip had audible-beep on one side, 50-Hz-pulse on the other. Either way, filmstrips were above all an opportunity for the teacher to sneak out to Flavor Country and rot his or her lungs.
Speaking of hip lingo, I’ve always found it odd that square, squeaky clean, middle-America Chrysler used the word “scat” in the midst of the sexual revolution…
I’m not sure that, even today, the word ‘scat’ has the extreme connotation that some ascribe to it. It certainly didn’t back in 1970. Back then, as a noun, it was most commonly used as a term for a specific style of jazz music. With Dodge, it was most definitely a verb. I can’t imagine anyone thinking of something sexual with the word ‘scat’ used in national automotive advertising from 1968-71. For all intents and purposes, it was Dodge’s version of the Road Runner phenomena, only with bumble-bee stripes and a little cartoon bee. BTW, the Chrysler stylists hated those stripes. They were very incensed at having spent years in design school, only to have their work mucked-up with stripes by marketing guys.
I heard my mother shout “Scat!” at stray animals in the backyard often enough that I never thought twice about the usage until recently. I always just assumed that “scat” naturally meant something like “get the hell outta here right this second”. Which a really fast Dodge could do. 🙂
The first thing that comes to my mind when I hear “scat” is animal poop…
That’s what I always thought….
That poor woman doesn’t know she’s driving both a stick shift and an automatic!
Groovy film man! Did people really go to a dealer’s service department back then to get performance parts for racing? Seems like kind of a strange thing to do now, but this was almost 50 years ago. Were these Dodge parts, or would dealers back then stock a wide selection of aftermarket parts too?
Chrysler’s performance-parts operation was called Direct Connection. The parts were all sold under the Mopar-Direct Connection name. Most of them were factory-engineered, though there were some made by other companies. It was not a multi-brand speed shop type of deal, though; everything in the cattledog was Direct Connection. The operation was renamed Mopar Performance sometime in the ’80s and still exists. Ford and GM had (and have) similar operations.
It still exists to this day, but mostly for Japanese manufacturers. Honda has HPS, Mazda has Mazdaspeed, Nissan has NISMO, and Toyota has TRD. In the early aughts both Mazda and Toyota had a fair amount of stuff available, because their lineup had vehicles that were conducive to it, but they have dialed back quite a bit today (really it’s only Miata and FR-S to work with now). NISMO is the biggest player today (Sentra turbo, Juke, 370Z, GT-R, Infinitis with the VQ).
Currently I believe it’s still Mopar for Chrysler, Chevrolet Performance Parts for GM, and Ford Performance for Ford. Though they mostly seem to cater to the V8s crowd, supplying crate engines and parts for legacy engines. Ford has changed the name of their performance parts operation like musical chairs, currently it’s Ford Performance, but before that it was Ford Racing, before that I think it may have been called SVO(special vehicle operations, not to be confused with SVT), and before that Motorsport. There may be more earlier that I don’t know as well.
Neat part is buying used speed parts and finding the old Motorsport stuff that is still in production, but with the current labels. One of my most novel junkyard finds was a 140mph speedometer out of a wrecked 1987 Mustang LX 5.0, which came from the factory with the mandatory 85mph oneuntil 1989. The Motorsport 140 was identical to the stock 89-93 140 but it had the cool old Motorsport text written below. I’ve seen some cool day two Chrysler builds with the old Direct Connection valve covers too.
I was expecting to hear a painful attempt by the marketers trying to talk to the Woodstock generation, but this seems to be an honest attempt to make sure their 45 year old salesmen that had been selling various iterations of Darts for the last decade were aware of the performance options available on the newer and likely fairly profitable cars.
Anecdotally, the only new muscle car buyer I knew was our backyard neighbor in 1970, who bought a loaded GTO. He was an attorney with two young kids and his wife drove a Sedan deVille. I recall he was also into fancy home stereo equipment. He probably did read the “buff” publications and likely knew his way around the Pontiac product catalog.