Two major seventies fads in one ad!
It’s a bit hard to imagine the police wanting cars with hidden headlights, given their somewhat notorious unreliability.
Vintage Ad: 1976 Dodge Monaco Police Car – When Cop Cars Had Hidden Headlights And Cops Had Long Hair
– Posted on April 28, 2023
These were odd. Given the several front ends these cars were given, I’m surprised they didn’t put a police special front on these cars.
Be it ever so humble and homely, the timid Fury front had a total cop vibe to it.
When I was a kid in the 80s, so.many TV shows got on with all sorts of car action. Long drifts, burnouts, jumps, smashing through walls…
Then, there was Hill Street Blues.
A couple of floaty-bloat-y cop cars driving casually through some bumpy alley…
Also…
Helmet, check.
Goggles, yep, got ’em on.
Mustache, definitely mustaching.
Let’s do this!
–
(Joking aside, Hill Street Blues was a good show, and I really like the full theme song.)
I don’t get the seat belt usage with crash helmet.
The seatbelt was to protect the cop. The crash helmet is to protect the hair.
And big mustaches and sideburns! But at least most of them didn’t have full beards nor tattoos back then. I think these make the officers look dirty and like thugs. They need a clean cut image as protectors of good!
While it’s true that hidden headlights are notoriously unreliable, it’s not actually a safety issue. IIRC, after a few fledgling years when they worked off of electric motors, they gravitated to they gravitated to operating off of engine vacuum which is what holds them closed. When activated, the vacuum is bled off and the doors open.
The headlight covers are otherwise spring-loaded so if there’s a lack of vacuum from, say, a leaking vacuum line (which is where the unreliability comes from), they will automatically be held open.
Actually, the Chrysler system continued to use electric motors. My 77 Chrysler’s were electric, and it was common to unplug them with the doors open in the winter months when ice and snow could cause them to freeze/bind and blow a fuse. As I recall, these had a knob you could turn to open the doors if the electric motor failed.
I know that the Ford system worked as you described. Those open headlight doors on 76-78 New Yorkers really messed with the cars’ good looks, especially those in lighter colors.
Like this one
Brought back memories of winters with the Sport Suburban, I hated leaving the headlights open as it destroyed the whole point of having them in the first place. The user manual referred to unplugging them and turning the “knurled wheel” as the method to open them, but I just switched the lights on and unplugged them.
Great ad! I find it kind of amazing that the police version used the hidden headlights, but then again, it was probably cheaper than offering two different front ends given the terrible civilian sales of these cars.
This guy looks like the Marlboro Man, police officer edition.
I had no idea the Village People drove Chicago police cars.
One of them was a police officer…
What? No chromed sunglasses?
Another Hill Street Blues fan here .
Many of the episodes were filmed in skid row Los Angeles .
Those weren’t crash helmets, they were riot helmets and cops wore them in So. Cal. for much of the 1970’s .
I like that Monaco .
-Nate
Those were the days! Mustache, sideburns, and police with long hair! 76 Dodge Royal Monaco Brougham was a real beauty. Good year for full size upscale Chrysler Corp vehicles. If I could turn back time! Now we have law enforcement in damn SUVS! 🙄 🤮. Can’t wait to see what happens when law enforcement is in long distance pursuit in electrics and runs out of power! 🤔
Same thing that happens when they run out of gas!
It doesn’t matter if it takes five minutes or five hours, if you need to fill up you’ve lost ’em – and if a pursuit lasts long enough for that to happen, by that time there’d be plenty of backup and probably a chopper on them so one car dropping off wouldn’t matter.
From an art direction POV, I’d recommend live action staged road chase photos for such brochures and marketing material. Exciting photos of Dodge police cars in use. Static police car illustrations looked dated (for 1976), and as boring as many illustrations on model kit boxes.
Pictured cop reminds me a bit of Vic Morrow.
I recently watched a corny Vic Morrow made-for-TV cop movie the other day. He was a murderous cop in a hot-rod Mopar who would run outsiders off the road and into a gulch.
But he messed with Martin Sheen’s fictional brother and young Marty came into town with a built-to-the-hilt ‘32 and let ol’ Vic fly off the road instead. All cliché’s were present and accounted for.
You are referring to ‘The California Kid’, a great made-for-TV movie from 1974. I enjoyed it as a kid, with Morrow as a good cop, turned bad.
With my original comment, I was thinking of Morrow in his 1973 Police Story pilot movie appearance.
I used to have that movie taped on VHS from when they’d still rerun made for TV movies on TV in the 90s. I had Christine(the highly edited tv friendly verson) and Duel on the same tape, which is actually different from the theatrical cut, I remember thinking the filming locations looked very similar.
I wonder if Steven King picked a 57/58 Plymouth in Christine because of that movie, the Plymouth cop car was a menacing looking killing machine in the hands of Morrow.
Popup headlight sprayers suffered the same fate as hidden headlamps. Fairly reliable in temperate environments but fail quickly in cold weather and precipitation.
I sure do think those old photos of the cops of yesterday are really cool! Long hair beats the egghead style of today’s cop. Too bad those ’70s styles went out. Also, full-size cop cars were all around safer than the snubnosed compacts and SUVs of today; more front end metal for protection in a crash.
Speaking of 1970’s styles let’s not forget that for a breif shining moment wedding attire meant clean jeans, a new T-Shirt and highly polished Frye Motocycle boots…..
-Nate
Are you even serious? Fifty years of crash test technology later and you think that any 1970’s shitbox is safer? Wow! The car companies sure were dumb to invest all of that money into crash tests when they had the perfect car in 1976!?!?!?!?!
If you ran a ’76 Monaco head-on into, say, a brand new Mitsubishi Mirage, you might come out better in the Monaco. But, run each one head-on into some fixed barrier, like a bridge abutment or large tree, I’m sure you’d be better off in the Mirage.
I wouldn’t exactly feel like I was flirting with certain death in some big mid-70’s mastodon, but I’d also respect it for what it is, and understand that there have been decades of crash protection and occupant safety improvements since then. I also imagine that something like a 4-door hardtop would fare especially horribly, if it got t-boned by something like a full-sized SUV or pickup truck.
It was just the look back then. This cop could very easily been the very handsome Sam Elliot. Just look back and smile.