This ad is almost as off-base as the Fairmont ad the other day. Big expensive house with a youngish couple in their tennis outfits, posing with a Comet four door. Seriously? Can you say BMW?
Oh; I know the explanation:
It’s the maid’s car.
Clueless Vintage Ad: 1974 Mercury Comet 4-Door Sedan – Just What Every Rich Young Couple Wanted
– Posted on November 18, 2021
And it is not even the Luxe model (whatever Mercury called the equivalent of the Maverick LDO) with the vinyl roof and the side moldings.
But maybe it was a higher class of buyer who bought a low to mid trim compact from the Lincoln dealer?
Counsel, your last line is about as powerful a defence as being flogged with a damp lettuce when compared with your forensically remorseless defence of Ford in the Fairmont Litigation of the previous date, but I suppose one cannot pick one’s case.
Hmmm…..A Mercury Comet is definitely not the car Biff and Muffy would take to the country club for a game tennis with Palmer and Cressida. They would show up in style in this fabulous car.
They are in the Comet because the Mercedes is in the shop. Again.
Well played…
“Muffy”
No need to pick on the grooming habits of the 70s, now.
In those days, selling cars was still about selling a dream. Except in this case, it wasn’t the purchasers dream that was being sold. It was Mercury’s dream that Biff and Muffy would buy a car like the Comet.
Nice try. No cigar.
Bill Clinton used a cigar…
Close…
While it’s unlikely that a young, upwardly mobile couple would be tooling around in a grungy 4-door Comet, to be fair, wealthy people are not known to squander their money, and would, at the very least, understand auto depreciation quite well and purchase vehicles accordingly. A seventies’ Mercury Comet, besides the obvious shortcomings, just isn’t a very good auto investment.
Toyota had not yet gotten the big foothold in US sales by 1974 but, ultimately, I would venture to guess that, today, most wealthy people drive higher-trim, electrified Camrys, Avalons, or Lexuses.
This. My in-laws are very well off, their latest car purchase was a Lexus ES 300h. Further understanding depreciation (not much in a Lexus but some considering it’s a sedan in an SUV world) they chose a CPO example. Yes, the truly wealthy typically do not squander their money away…
Even in that price class, the old rich wouldn’t go for a Maverick/Comet. I knew two old rich families around 1970. One drove a Torino, the other an AMC Ambassador. Both had luxurious and comfortable interiors with modest exteriors, the mark of old rich.
Mavericks were NOT comfy inside. I owned one and my back still remembers the wildly uncomfortable seat.
Forget that car! If one’s maid is playing tennis, one is quite overpaying her.
Maybe their parents came to visit, and they’re cropped out of the photo along with the 911? Naah, mom and dad would be driving a Mercedes.
That’s Mom & Dad’s house, and the Comet is their wedding present to Biff and Muffy.
My father owned a 75 Comet 4 door, very much like this one, in baby blue. I imagine it was typical of what the average Comet/Maverick buyer bought: 6 cylinder engine, automatic transmission, power steering and brakes, whitewall tires, and the small (dog dish) hubcaps. When the car was a couple of years old I surprised my folks by giving their humble sedan a rejuvenating sort of ” makeover “. I replaced the tired/dirty carpeting with brand new, Ford brand, carpets front and back and replaced the tiny hubcaps with a nice set of wheelcovers that were the same as those used on the Granada/Monarch. The car looked much better in just one afternoon. Unfortunately, to drive, it was still just a Comet. Same lifeless power steering and same tortuous bench seats. Definitely NOT the kind of car you willingly bought as the family’s only car unless you were on a very strict budget,
BTW, my father and mother would have been old enough to be the parents of the pictured couple when they bought their Comet back in 1975.
But, but…it looks just like a BMW…for thousands less!
It looks just like a BMW … from thousands of inches away!
That was a common theme in the 1960s and 1970s…a tarted up car for “thousands less than the Europeans” or “a Buick or Cadillac”.
Are the ads that Ford ran comparing the 2-door Granada, at $3800, against a Mercedes 450SLC, at $xx,000 coming next? Now that is off-base!
or the couple’s family owned a LM franchise
The Coke Bottle works on a lot of cars; on this one, it just seems to droop in the middle. Because we already know the two door?
+1 My wealthiest client ever drove an Oldsmobile Delta 88. He was still driving it when it was eight years old last I knew. The interior was clean but it was obvious the exterior was not meticulously maintained. Rust was not really a problem in Texas. But a Mercury Comet, no.
Perhaps he didn’t want to look too rich. Another well-to-do client (though not nearly as wealthy) was followed home as he drove his Maserati Quattroporte. He was accosted in his driveway and nearly had his arm broken as the thief wrenched his Rolex off his wrist.
Didn’t Rose Kennedy own a Delmont 88 that became a submarine?
Yes, she did. It submerged on 16 July, 1969, with a crew of two, Teddy Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne on board. Only Teddy made it to the escape trunk!
RE : July 16th 1969 ~
‘Bobby, I’m pregnant !’ .
‘Don’t worry baby, we’ll cross that bridge when we come ti it ‘ .
-Nate
Considering when this ad ran it doesn’t seem so weird. A lot of people were faithful to a certain local dealership. If Daddy Gotrocks bought his Lincoln Continental from the local Lincoln Mercury dealer than a Comet might be what he bought for his daughter Muffy. Biff doesn’t seem to mind either. I can’t be sure but I have a feeling that Daddy Gotrocks doesn’t like Biff.
They’re an outwardly wealthy, upstanding couple by day, thrill-seeking hooligan criminals by night, in the best 70s thriller tradition, and have cleverly chosen a low-profile getaway vehicle for their nefarious schemes.
Oh, come on! We all know the perfect getaway vehicle for the 70s was a ’68 Nova in grey primer!
Maybe those two are the Anti-Hart to Harts! Hey, how come the Harts never had a recurring nemesis?
You just described the adult film stars that live down the street from me.
You never know, especially with the really old money wealthy. A friend of the family, who’s mother was a Vanderbilt, was a physician in NYC, and lived in a huge co-op on Riverside Drive. The family owned a 40 acre lake estate on Squam Lake NH (where On Golden Pond was filmed within direct view of this estate) with a 1/2 mile of shoreline, 5 turn of the century rustic “cottages”, a beautiful wood ’47 Chris Craft exactly like the one in the movie, a clay tennis court, and had William Paley, the CEO of CBS, as a neighbor up the lake about a mile. The good doctor, in his late 60s at the time when we stayed in one of their cottages for several summers, always dressed in matching khaki Dickies pants and shirt, and drove a beige ’68 Falcon base model, 3 spd stick, radio and heater, and rubber floor mats. It was his only car, not needing one in the city. You just never know.
I can afford to dress a lot better than I do, but I draw the line at polyester trou.
At face value this Comet is punching above its weight in terms of setting. But, I’ve driven relatively modest cars to upscale looking places. The setting looks like a house, but it also looks a lot like an apple farm I visit each fall, across the street from a beautiful golf course. The parking lots have everything from Lincoln Navigators to Ford Focus models in them.
And, I’ve known some very well off people, both famous and quietly wealthy that have allowed modest cars to punch way above their weight in their garage.
Sure beats the setting in a typical Craigslist photo – and this one is really not bad….
Oh seriously. That is not their house behind the car.
That’s their CARRIAGE house. Observe the roofline and tower, darlings.
You’re right! The two-door gets the place of honor in front of the main house:
I think that this might be the maid who keeps parking on the lawn. To her credit, she doesn’t normally do things like that. It’s only when she’s been drinking.
The chrome strip painted onto the sill in the photo sure makes the car look frumpy.
That is bizarre. What’s even stranger is that there’s another shot taken at the same time and used in the brochure, but the chrome strip is not touched up.
So the Comet actually belongs to Biff’s older brother Chad?
Is it just the too-narrow tread, or is the rear camber off?
Need to tell the maid to stop parking on the lawn.
Ruined by the 5mph bumpers.
I like the pre-5mph 1972 Maverick/Comet 4-door. It’s the closest thing available in the US market to the Mk3 Cortina.
Smart money puts as little equity into a depreciating asset as possible. The Comet looks
shockingly cheap in a rural Pennsylvania senior citizen kind of way. This couple
looks more like VW people to me, possibly a Gremlin for the camp factor.
“The Comet looks shockingly cheap in a rural Pennsylvania senior citizen kind of way.”
LOL…man oh man, I 100% get this reference. My grandparents (rest their long departed souls) spent their retirement years in Clearfield County, PA. Beautiful country….depressing standard of living…
The rich wouldn’t have wanted the Comet, but a lot of up and coming, soon to be yuppies in the 70s were still coveting Cadillacs and Lincolns. I had an aunt and uncle who would have been in their early thirties when this ad was published. They had Sedan de Villes, but they lived in the Inland Empire of Washington state – Spokane area. West coast tastes lagged for quite awhile.
In the case of my aunt and uncle, I believe they still drive Cadillacs and they can definitely afford BMWs or Mercedes.
According to “The Millionaire Next Door”, written by Thomas Stanley and some one else, late 1990s, the top ride of the “rich” was an F-150.
Large GM cars were also popular, as were Mercedes and Lexus.
BMWs, Porsches, Corvettes, Jaguars, and other cool cars were not.
Ironically, the author of the best-seller, indulged himself and got a Corvette. One of the few times I was reading the NY Times, page 1, business section, he died in an auto accident–his Corvette was hit by a truck (I think an F-150).
One of the wealthiest people I know drove (new) Chevy Caprices, every 2-4 years.
Daughter comes home for the weekend with boy friend from college in her “college” car that her parents gave her. Out for a little tennis in the backyard behind the carriage house. They will return from the south shore to Boston to their respective colleges, Harvard and Wellesley on Sunday. Upon graduation, Daddy will upgrade her to a BMW.
Daddy bought it for his little girl because he was too cheap to buy her a BMW! LOL!
Except the joke’s on Dad, because he spent far more on repairs to that POS than he would have if he had bought the Bimmer up-front, even accounting for the massive markups on BMW parts and labor rates at the dealership! Hey, those white lab coats that BMW technicians wear cost a fortune to keep clean!
The wealthiest guy I knew in Lake Bluff Illinois, and inherited millions upon millions of dollars, had to make due during college in a Chevette. His family wanted him to appreciate the real world before inheriting his wealth. I believe that Warren Buffet did this to his kids as well. Most likely this guy’s family were friends with the Buffets.
Whoever created that ad had to realize how ridiculous it looked. It would be like Jocelyn Wildenstein in an ad for Revlon cosmetics.
now that made me laugh
These cars were a reasonably sized compact car in the 2 door configuration. The four door was just too big. Imagine a Duster in a 4 door version? No, it hurts the eyes.
A friend had a Comet. As Howard Kerr commented above, she talked about its lifeless acceleration, poor braking, and lousy steering. When asked how she really felt about it, she would substitute a “V” for the “C” at the beginning of the car’s name.
Being a kid on the 70s and seeing things like this all the time is why the 80s angular/boxy cars looked so modern, and fresh.
Maybe kids who grew up with boxy cars were happy to see the ovoid stuff take over.
But I haven’t met (m)any.
Maybe kids who grew up with boxy cars were happy to see the ovoid stuff take over.
But I haven’t met (m)any.
I’d say I grew up during the transition, boxy/angular 80s cars still were common as dirt in the 90s and the jellybean stuff was proliferating quickly. As a kid I thought most of the boxy sedans looked like bleak relics, even my mom’s MKII Jetta seemed dorky in its boxiness to me, though not as much so as the broughamy K cars or most GMs, I thought fresh new sedans like the Dodge Intrepid looked amazing in their rounded sleekness. Growing up in the suburban Chicago area anything over 15 years old wasn’t very common due to obvious environmental factors so when I started getting introduced to old cars through old movies or books seeing a curvy early 70s car like a Charger or Satellite to me was “wow, Now that’s cool looking!” That that same company would later pedal K cars was incomprehensible to my young mind. I would have thought the same about the Comet, I definitely would have thought it had way better styling than the Zephyr that replaced it
For me I didn’t really start appreciating the sheer look and general early 80s boxiness until like 10 years ago, and I think it’s because it looks refreshing compared to what currently is so common. See, Jellybean, rounded, Ovoid, breadroll, whatever you want to call it design never really got succeeded, a 2021 sedan wouldn’t stand out much if it were time traveled back to 1996, 90s people would probably just ponder “why are the alloy wheels black???” It’s hard to be nostalgic about a design theme that hasn’t actually ended yet(and probably won’t unless the origami cybertruck moves a million units a year)
The problem with the Comet (and Maverick) is that Ford grafted those huge, rectangular chrome bumpers on to a body that had not been designed with them in mind. The big, rectangular chrome bumpers mounted on each end of a body with lots of curves doesn’t work.
The Fairmont and Zephyr were at least designed with 5-mph bumpers in mind.
It’s 1973-74, the economy is bad, fuel prices are going up and gas lines are a recent memory, the Watergate scandal and corruption are taking down Nixon and Agnew, and expectations are being adjusted. Buy a Comet for now so you can pay the mortgage and keep up the pretense of being well off in other areas?
In the first picture it looks like the two are holding the Wilson T2000 from the time. In the second picture from Paul below it looks like the wood rackets are Dunlops to me. I had both during that time frame and still have the Dunlop. My hair was definitely more than what Buff exhibits in the first shot and no I didn’t own a Comet.
Is your name Jeff and did you once have a band called “The Electric Light Orchestra”?
@ tbm3fan :
Grant, is that you ? .
I had photos from my wedding in 1976 that look *exactly* like this .
What a tough crowd here .
-Nate
I had a 4 door Maverick back in the day, probably the least memorable car ever, it did the job though.
I’m having trouble writing-off to camera angle the far to LH shift of the bumper and guard.
My second car was a 1975 Mercury Comet 2-door which I drove through my college years. I lived in a dorm at a state university and then in a 12′ x 45′ trailer house. (My first car was ’69 Chevy with 265,000 miles on it when the timing chain broke and I only had it for a little more than year.) The Comet died after only 145,000 miles shortly after graduation. The car threw a rod on the way to work and came to a stop in front of an auto recycling center. It was karma and a sign from the heavens that I needed a new car. And I’ve been driving Hondas ever since.
Curiously, my family also owned a 1974 Ford Maverick LDO 4-door sedan. It belonged to the family dog. My parents grew tired of the dog’s white fur sticking the brown velour of their Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser and the navy velour of their Pontiac Parisienne. When they “inherited” the Maverick they kept it to schlepp around town on errands with the dog, instead of the good cars. When the dog finally died, they sold the Maverick to a neighbor who bought it for his daughter to take to college.
My interpretation of this photo is that the young lady is Leighton, a sophomore at Vassar. The gentleman is her boyfriend, Rockwell, a junior at Bard College. The car is hers, a high school graduation gift from Mumsy and Daddykins meant for driving back and forth to school. The house in the background is the guest house on Daddykin’s property, and the kids are home for spring break.
Ah, yes. I recall reading a news story about a spoiled young woman, (no doubt one of Leighton’s classmates) who, in the late 1970s or possibly 1980, had been gifted with the graduation present of a new Ford Pinto. The disappointed then young woman responded by smashing a glass pitcher full of iced tea into her mother’s face. How unseemly.
She then stole her mother’s checkbook and bought herself what she really wanted. A BMW 320i.
@Johnster ~
A true story or urban myth ? .
Certainly no child of mine would ever do this, I’d give them a bicycle instead after any any display of un gratefulness .
With black wall tiers and only three speeds .
-Nate
I can’t say about that story but I remember reading of a similarly ungrateful kid in the local newspaper many years ago.
The kid had received a new BMW of his choice for his 16th birthday. Well time passes and the kid is now bored with it and now lusts for a different car, that I no longer remember what it was. When begging Mommy and Daddy didn’t get the desired results he hatched a plan.
If the current car was gone, they would have no choice but to buy him a new car! So he gave the key and some cash to a couple of less well off students at his High School. They took it out in the woods, removed the seats, tires and wheels, and then set it on fire. Apparently it only took a couple of days until it all unraveled.
Thank you Scout Dude ! .
As a single Father I’m appalled .
My son is a hard worker like me and doesn’t much like freebies, I had him pay for his first car (1963 VW #117 Beetle) as well as pay for the tags and insurance to teach him responsibility .
He turned it into a fearsome street racer and never once dented much less crashed it .
The which is obtained to easily is now well valued .
Parents are just that, those who try to be their progeny’s friends wind up with kartrashians or drug dealers .
I love reading the life stories here, they’re intertwined with vehicles and that makes them relevant to those who pay attention .
Notice I didn’t say I disbelieve that story, I was just curious .
_Way_ too many rich & spoiled brats these days .
-Nate
I do believe that something that is earned is typically more cherished.
I do understand the desire to give your kid nice things and advantages if you can afford them, but there certainly seems to be an ever increasing number of people who take it too far and create ungrateful little brats.
@ScoutDude
The primary problem is ‘parents’ who think they’re the kids friends……
Everything goes down hill from there .
Our son doesn’t much like his mother who used to tell him “ignore your father, do whatever you want, it’s O.K. because I love you more” .
Now she wonders why we’re tight and he doesn’t answer her calls .
-Nate
Why do I think his parents refused to replace the car?
I thought of Lyle and Erik Menendez, who killed their parents in 1989 and are now doing life. One of them had received an Alfa-Romeo for his birthday, high school, graduation, I forget what milestone. He termed it a “piece of shit” because it wasn’t the 911 he wanted. Not only a First World problem, but a 1% problem! What an entitled brat.
It can’t be easy to commit the perfect crime. I’ve never thought I should try it.