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Curbside Follow-Up: 1960 Plymouth Belvedere – Spaceship, Caught In Town

By
Rich Baron
– Posted on July 12, 2024

Photos from the Cohort by Slant Six. 

I asked for these images last time I posted about this 1960 Belvedere, so I might as well formally follow up. On that last occasion, the Belvedere was found on stands by a driveway. The question naturally came: Could this old Exner-spaceship fly? Or was it perenially bound to its landing place?

Well, as can be seen, the spaceship does fly. Its appearances are rare, but occur nonetheless. And now the question is, what do younger earthlings think when coming across this otherworldly machine in movement? Or even parked?

As mentioned in previous installments, the Belvedere’s visage is rather alien and not too friendly looking. Then again, against the modern angry-appliances we now drive, maybe this old spaceship doesn’t look that menacing anymore.

 

Related CC reading:

Cohort Sighting: 1960 Plymouth Fury – Googie This

CC Capsule: 1960 Plymouth Deluxe 2-Door Wagon – Deluxe Accommodations

Cohort Pic(k) Of The Day: 1960 Plymouth DeLuxe Suburban Wagon – Good Bones, Big Fins And Wild Dash 

← Vintage Snapshots: Cities And Downtowns Across The US – 1950s-1960s
Curbside Classic: 1957 Ford Del Rio Ranch Wagon – The Pickup Of Its Time →

41 Comments

  1. Reply
    avatar ravenuer
    Posted July 12, 2024 at 8:10 AM

    Forgot how ugly these tanks were.

    • Reply
      avatar tbm3fan
      Posted July 12, 2024 at 8:24 AM

      You said pretty much the exact same thing back in April in the very first comment. Now we need DougD…

      • Reply
        avatar ravenuer
        Posted July 12, 2024 at 9:45 AM

        At least I’m consistent in my opinions!

        • Reply
          avatar tbm3fan
          Posted July 12, 2024 at 4:30 PM

          Consistency is good

    • Reply
      avatar slant six
      Posted July 12, 2024 at 8:36 AM

      I think it’s fantastic especially when I pass Butch (the owner) driving in town and I have one of my ’60’s MoPars out and I wave and honk back. It is like we were transported back in time 55 years!

    • Reply
      avatar Bryan
      Posted July 12, 2024 at 8:56 AM

      I think they look good.

  2. Reply
    avatar rudiger
    Posted July 12, 2024 at 8:55 AM

    While it’s a toss-up between the 1960 Fury and the 1961 version, I think I’d give the ugly nod to the earlier car, thanks entirely to the most ungainly fins of any of the Forward Look cars, along with those goofy front fender ‘coves’. It might be due to the deletion of the side-spear, but I really can’t tell if the fins were actually changed from the earlier years. I know they sure ‘look’ like they were altered (and not in a good way).

    In fact, to create a truly over-the-top, bizarre car, I’d like to see a 1961 Fury grille attached to a 1960 car. That would be one to rival Homer Simpson’s Powell Motors dream car.

    • Reply
      avatar Stéphane Dumas
      Posted July 12, 2024 at 10:54 AM

      Now then you mention it, the other way could be interesting as well, to see a 1960 Fury grille attached to a 1961 car.

      But still, some filmakers menaged to disguise a 1960 Dodge Dart or export-only DeSoto Diplomat into a 1957-58 Plymouth Fury or Belvedere being chased by an Opel in a car chase scene from a movie titled “The Master Touch”.

      • Reply
        avatar rudiger
        Posted July 12, 2024 at 12:49 PM

        What a great chase scene! It’s fun to watch the beginning as it starts with a 1958 Fury hardtop, then morphs into a Dart Phoenix 4-door sedan with glued-on tailfins (with badly copied side trim spears) to cover the original, reverse type, and in the final shot, it’s back to being the Fury!

        Of particular note is when the transporter loses the car and it falls, upside down, onto the Opel.

        I wonder if this movie helped inspire Stephen King.

      • Reply
        avatar -Nate
        Posted July 12, 2024 at 7:31 PM

        THANK YOU for this great movie clip ! .

        I’m off to share it =8-) .

        -Nate

  3. Reply
    avatar Tygerleo
    Posted July 12, 2024 at 8:57 AM

    Is this model with the highest fins for a production care?

    • Reply
      avatar ravenuer
      Posted July 12, 2024 at 10:24 AM

      Either this one or the 59 Caddy. Would have to measure them.

      • Reply
        avatar Ralph L
        Posted July 12, 2024 at 1:48 PM

        The Cadillac fins appear especially tall because the body line and trunk droop so much.

      • Reply
        avatar Peter Wilding
        Posted July 12, 2024 at 2:21 PM

        To my eyes these look especially tall because of the way they suddenly swoop up aft of the rear wheels. That makes them especially shocking. The Cadillac’s are more gradual, more integrated.

    • Reply
      avatar Evil Ron
      Posted July 12, 2024 at 2:25 PM

      The Chrysler engineers called them ‘stabilizers’ not fins. Ten years later the Superbird debuted

      • Reply
        avatar rudiger
        Posted July 13, 2024 at 7:49 AM

        In what is almost certainly an irony, those 1969-70 Daytona/Superbird vertical stabilizers actually work at NASCAR track speeds.

        OTOH, the horizontal ‘Batmobile’ tailfins of the 1959-60 full-size Chevrolet had the opposite result of lifting the car’s rear end at high speeds. In effect, the Chevy’s tailfins were ‘anti-stabilizers’.

        • Reply
          avatar Evil Ron
          Posted July 13, 2024 at 10:51 AM

          I owned a Superbird in the early 70’s and the wing and nosecone worked at highway speeds as well. It was never affected by crosswinds and the rush of air from a semi going the opposite direction was heard but not felt.

  4. Reply
    avatar CD3
    Posted July 12, 2024 at 9:12 AM

    Call me insane, but I like the looks. Bold, different. And no vinyl roof (if my delicate old eyes are communicating the truth to my brain)
    But then, I liked the more styled cats of back then. Not the every “me too” vehicle on our roads today.
    Oh well. I suppose if I’m kicked out, that’s alright.
    But I still like the looks of this model

  5. Reply
    avatar dman
    Posted July 12, 2024 at 9:24 AM

    The spaceship analogy is interesting, as that front end has a Spock-like facial expression.

  6. Reply
    avatar BlueovalDave
    Posted July 12, 2024 at 11:02 AM

    I like these. You have to take them in context. People seem to fall all over the ’59 Cadillac but that car is more outrageous and bizarre than this. Also I think those are ’62 Fury hubcaps which have a flying saucer look to them.

  7. Reply
    avatar robadr
    Posted July 12, 2024 at 11:27 AM

    Love the top shot – clearly a visitor from another planet.

    Alternate title – ‘Suddenly it’s 1959!’ 🙂

    • Reply
      avatar Stéphane Dumas
      Posted July 12, 2024 at 3:42 PM

      Some people once joked by saying “Suddenly it’s 1957” because the tailfins was remeniscent of the 1957 models and also the newly introduced Dodge Dart as a Plymouth sized companion to their Matador and Polara (who replaced the Coronet, Royal and Custom Royal nameplates but Coronet would return for the 1965 model year), grabbed some potential Plymouth customers as well.
      https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/auction-classic/curbside-classic-1960-dodge-matador-polara-incredible-cars-somehow-overlooked/

      • Reply
        avatar rudiger
        Posted July 13, 2024 at 8:04 AM

        I wonder if any other marketing of a heavily style-dependent product has made a similar blunder of specifically stating how long they were going to continue with a particular style.

        The “Suddenly, It’s 1960!” ad campaign must have seemed like such a brilliant idea at the time, only for Chrysler to discover that the whole tailfin gimmick was a brief, flash-in-the-pan that looked dated a short three years later.

        It’s nothing short of a miracle that a major US company like Chrysler that was such a chaotic mess in the late fifties/early sixties managed to, somehow, survive.

  8. Reply
    avatar Wrong Trousers
    Posted July 12, 2024 at 11:55 AM

    I am OK with the front and rear view, its the weird front wheel arch cutout and the headlight chrome eyebrow that drops down around the front wheel arch that looks odd

    Put a conventional wheel arch opening and stop the chrome eyebrow wrapping far around the front wing and I don’t think it would be bad looking car

    • Reply
      avatar Peter Wilding
      Posted July 12, 2024 at 2:23 PM

      I agree. It’s just the front fenders that look odd.

    • Reply
      avatar rudiger
      Posted July 13, 2024 at 7:41 AM

      In looking at that front fender ‘cove’ styling gimmick, I wonder if it could have been improved simply by making the front fender wheelwells a much more conventional rounded shape.

      The way it was done, the wheelwells have a distorted, somewhat oval shape that doesn’t line up with the tire/wheel, reminiscent of the distorted wheelwells of the early sixties’ Rambler American with a similar tire/wheel location that wasn’t properly centered.

  9. Reply
    avatar VanillaDude
    Posted July 12, 2024 at 12:01 PM

    This is such an amazing design. I simply cannot fathom anything this outrageous being approved for manufacturing. The front end looks like a character from “Five Nights at Freddies.” That is a cartoon rear fin. There is such a thing as trying too hard, and this goes way beyond that. It makes the worse of the 1970-1980 Nissans look tame.

  10. Reply
    avatar J P Cavanaugh
    Posted July 12, 2024 at 12:05 PM

    Both this car and the 61 suffer from the attempt to tie the front wheel opening to the fender eyebrow. It was one of those great, original ideas that just doesn’t work. I like the rear a lot, and like the rear of the 61 as much. I love this hardtop roof, too.

    Bravo to the owner for keeping it on the road and frightening future generations of young children. 🙂

    • Reply
      avatar rollfast
      Posted July 12, 2024 at 1:33 PM

      I never thought about the front wheel opening, there’s so much else to look at. 🙂

      The hardtop roofline is lovely, as is the seemingly dashed-off cursive “Plymouth” on the trunklid—that sort of thing was very much in fashion for department stores and the like at the time.

  11. Reply
    avatar Peter Wilding
    Posted July 12, 2024 at 2:29 PM

    That first picture; for the first time it makes me see these as an integrated design. Why? Because that front fender oddness is minimised. Take that out of the visual equation and my eyes say Yes, this is a good looking car. Dated, sure, but attractive in a Jetsons kind of way.
    Then there’s the front.
    Wrong Trousers has it right. The fix would be easy. The grille doesn’t bother me. Just those fenders. Why did Exner do it like that?

    • Reply
      avatar BlueovalDave
      Posted July 13, 2024 at 3:13 PM

      Peter have you seen them 2 toned? They’ll have a solid color and then that front cover will be white. I think it works to be honest.

      • Reply
        avatar BlueovalDave
        Posted July 13, 2024 at 3:17 PM

        I meant front cove. Also bumper guard in front helps.

  12. Reply
    avatar JT
    Posted July 12, 2024 at 2:49 PM

    It’s a eye catcher for sure. Into pic looks like it recently left the showroom. The overall design though is just a collection of contradictions..
    Have to go look but in the “promotional materials”, “Chrysler didn’t call the fins, “fins”.
    I think “stabilizers”, maybe?

    • Reply
      avatar JT
      Posted July 12, 2024 at 2:54 PM

      Got caught is the “c/c” roll, “again.” Was trying to correct my typo. Made it worse.
      Second sentence show say “In the pics”, not “Into pic”.
      Here goes this effort! Hold on.

  13. Reply
    avatar -Nate
    Posted July 12, 2024 at 7:23 PM

    _I_ like it but had I bought it new in 1960 I think I’da been pretty pissed off by 1963 when it really did look weird .

    -Nate

  14. Reply
    avatar jonco43
    Posted July 12, 2024 at 10:13 PM

    The CC effect maybe ? . I recently watched the 1967 movie “In the Heat of the Night”.
    Featuring a 1960 Fury 4 door hardtop in a chase scene, a sinister looking vehicle indeed, not the sort of car you would want following close behind you.
    I think the 4 door looks more menacing than the 2 door, easier for more bad guys to pile into for the ride along. Great movie by the way.

    I like the featured Hardtop in the Belvedere trim single tone white color, certainly a rocket ship for the early 60s.

  15. Reply
    avatar Rob
    Posted July 13, 2024 at 8:37 AM

    The car of your dreams claimed Plymouth marketers. The sales reality was probably more like a nightmare. At least owners were finally free of “shake, rattle & roll” . . .

    https://media.dlib.indiana.edu/media_objects/z603r420w

    • Reply
      avatar JT
      Posted July 13, 2024 at 10:55 AM

      Had forgotten about that commercial; the “no more shake, rattle, roll, melody.
      Wasn’t it cured, stilled, by “unitized body”, construction?

  16. Reply
    avatar Thomas Merjanian
    Posted July 13, 2024 at 1:36 PM

    Great example of the demolition derby. I took notes just in case I get the urge. Fun video clip!

  17. Reply
    avatar Geeber
    Posted July 15, 2024 at 2:09 PM

    This very car was at the Carlisle Chrysler Nationals this past weekend. Those fins are massive (not just in height), and give the car a “tail heavy” look.

  18. Reply
    avatar Kego
    Posted July 16, 2024 at 12:44 PM

    I’ve always liked these cars and the front wheel arch. My only complaint is with all the 50s and 60 s cars and that is way too much trim is used to fill in empty spaces . I particularly dislike the toilet seats on 60s Chryslers and Plymouths. In this case the space ship exhaust on the fins are too much. The roundel on the Fury fits much better.

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