Looking at the taillights, seems to me the ones on the Sunrise look more pasted on than the Funrunner’s. The bigger question is: Why was I not aware of the existence of these two? I feel like a very important hole in may automotive knowledge has just been filled What a relief.
You’re right. My father was a commercial automotive illustrator and he called this type of work retouching.
Often things would change after the original shoot or the OEM or ad agency would want details to pop so he or others would paint what needed on a cell overlay and then the combined photo and cell would be reshot. At least that was the technique I most recall.
wow. Early version of photoshop? I didn’t know they could do that back then.
What he appears to be describing is actual photography. Not electronic photo manipulation, using software.
Photographic editing and manipulation is as old as photography itself. The Soviets had this down to a fine art, albeit for non-automotive purposes…
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/stalin-photo-manipulation-1922-1953/
Yep. My mother was a photo retoucher back in the fifties. She used to alter people’s expressions, take out wrinkles, stuff like that. Vanity work mostly, but it paid well. Occasionally in later years she’d get a call and dust off the light box and get out her pencils and brushes.
John Dillinger didn’t have much luck with his lady in red, hope the guy in top picture fares better.
At least two Aspen Sunrises have survived, both in near mint condition. One in New York with about 7,000 miles, and another in Florida with 44,000. The New York Aspen was featured in the October 2012 edition of Hemming’s Classic Car.
The brighter ‘Aspen’ badges on the trunk decklid, and the front fender, have been inserted as well in the ‘Sunrise’ image.
Given how identical the Volare and Aspen were, other than grille and tail light designs, it’s surprising for the first two years the Aspen had its parking lights inserted in the front bumper. While Volares had them adjacent to their headlights. For the 1978 MY the Aspen’s parking lights then moved to the same location as the Volare. Making the cars even more similar.
The similarity between Dodge and Plymouth vehicles really seemed to come to a head with the Neon. Quite literally, the only thing that separated the two models was that one had a Plymouth sticker on the trunklid while the other said, “Dodge”.
When I saw that, I distinctly remember thinking, “Well, that’s the end of Plymouth”. Sure enough, a scant six years later, Plymouth was gone.
And the Neon was badged as a Chrysler overseas, tho I think sales didn’t start in Europe until the 2nd generation.
The 1st-generation Neon was sold in numerous export markets, including Europe, from the start. Here’s a UK model.
After having a 77 Aspen wagon in the family for almost an eternity, i’m partial to the front end of the 76-77 Aspen.
Were these classic “spring editions” in the 1950s tradition? It wasn’t that long ago that I first ran into photos of mid-century Ramblers sporting cringe-worthy blades of extra chrome added to create artificial color breaks.
White walls on sport wheels may have been a transitional style between depression-era buyers and boomers. My Dad let me decorate our ’77Aspen when we custom ordered it, and I went with that combo.
The more you study these photos, the more you can see how much work went into them. They might have been created by combining a shot of the car using fill-in photo lights with one where said illumination wasn’t used; the cars have virtually no shadows on them at all, while the model does. She also has no feet!
You’d think her body would be visible through the window, too 😳
This is interesting. The78 Volare offered a Funrunner. Dodge did not list a Sunrise. In the 79 brochure there is a Sunrise which is the Aspen equivilent of the Volare Duster which was a new trim option for 79. Either the Sunrise was a 78 late addition or special or the 78 Volare image was retouched for a 79 Aspen promo.
Daniel M. The 76 and 77 Aspen and Volare did as you say have some different front sheetmetal much like the Dart and Valiant did right to the end. Chrysler likely had a very small budget for the 79 face-lift given their financial position and k car development.
I have some experience with these. My dad had a 76 Aspen Premier that was more refined than the Valiants and Darts that he owned prior but was victim to all of the now familiar issues these cars had. In college I had a base model 79 Aspen sedan that was a good car. I have some nostalgia for them.
The top-of-the-line Volare was the Premier. While, the top-of-the-line Aspen was the Special Edition.
Interesting. This post and the replies brings up a 45 year old memory. In 77 my dad bought his first new car. A mercedes benz 240d. As i write, memories of the color (maple yellow) the smell (mb tex and diesel) the sound (bbs in a coffe can) and the power (wait…nope..no memories of that)* arise. When he bought it i took. Brochures from the dealer. One thing i noticed right away was that the windshield leading edge vents were oddly blacked out on the 240D as if some one had neatly taken a sharpie to the brochure…and that the same pic was used for the 300d…which had chrome vents. Obvious now but for me at 12 years. So…i found the MB USA address and wrote. Basically said ” Whats going on with that blackout?” And something to the effect of “Whats a C11?” A couple months later i get a letter explaining that a 300d has chrome vents,the 240d has black plastic vents and thus the same pic was used with retouching and that i had a “good eye” THAT would have been good, but the lovely person in marketing also sent me a 8 x 11 glossy black and white of 3 of the MB C experimental cars along with 2 or 3 photocopued articles.about their history. Its a very nice memory…i would love to have a chance to tell that person how very very nice it was to get that.
As a young man I once sent a note of compliment to Don Petersen, then CEO of Ford Motor; about a week later I received at home a nice letter of thanks from him which I still have.
An early version of “photoshop” 😉😉😉😉
OK, I am officially embarrassed. If anyone here was paying his undivided attention to new Chrysler products in 1978 it was me, and I have no memory of these cars at all. None.
But then if there was one car that held no attraction for me at all from that time it would have been the Aspen/Volare coupe. From the moment that body came out, I could see nothing else but the awkward beltline rise from the rear of the door to the higher spot where the deck meets the C pillar. That sort of thing had worked on the Duster because of the Duster’s flowing lines, but not on this car.
As for the photo, I agree with everyone here – One car, one set of models, one guy back at the office doing re-touching.
It may have been a regional promotion, hence you missed it.
Olds had “Lion” editions of the 78 or 79 Cutlass Supreme, I’m pretty sure that was a tri-state New York metro area (NY/NJ/CT) factory trim package–really an option grouping (unless the 2-tone, or colors on the t-tone–creamy white / ruby red were unique), with the special 2-tone, I think bucket seats and floor shift, and of course ps/pb/auto.
In northeast Wisconsin Oldsmobile had the limited addition Cutlass OR7. This was sometime around the end of the colonade era. Olds had 7 dealers around the Green Bay and Fox Valley that would team up to do regional ads. The dealers were referred to as “The 7 Olds Reliables”, hence the OR7 model.
I think they copied the front wheel for the back on the Aspen, to make it look different from the Volare. However the front wheel slots are in the same position on both.
Also I think the sun had shifted between the two photos, the Aspen was a little later in the day.
At first glance I thought the headline of this piece said Frontrunner, rather than Funrunner. I was going to offer a correction to that, however unnecessary it may have been.
Ill conceived cars by Ma Mopar.
I remember the Volaré Funrunner, mainly because I saw it as a rather lame, half-baked effort to spin off the Road Runner name, not far removed from the Volaré Duster.
I have dimmer recollection of the Aspen Sunrise. At least the name was a bit more original. Of course, I suppose that could have been trying to capitalize on the popularity of both the song and drink at the time, Tequila Sunrise
I think Plymouth was already marked for dead by this point. If I remember my Allpar history correctly, Dodge dealers continually whined to corporate that they didn’t have cars they could sell as cheaply as the Plymouth dealer across town. Which they weren’t supposed to, because Dodge was supposed to be one step up the ladder. But Mama MoPar relented… culminating in the Neon, when they didn’t even bother to give the Dodge and Plymouth different names! Same car, same name, same base price. Savvy shoppers could go back and forth across town trying for a better deal. The big loser was corporate, who had too many dealers selling the same cars.
I think the last gasp for Plymouth was the 71 B bodies, on both coupes and sedans Dodges had round wheel openings with a radiused edge, Plymouth had square openings slightly flared out. Come the 1975 restyle there was no branding difference, both Dodge and Plymouth coupes used the square flared openings, sedans used the round radiused openings. Same thing with the 67 A body line where Dodge originally had more swept back openings, and Plymouth symmetrically square, but once the Duster body came to Dodge with the Demon and the Dart hardtop body to Plymouth the Scamp, and later consolidation of the sedans to the Dart sedan body that early differentiation merely became an artifact. It all just boiled down to grille design separating the brands by 1975 the Volare/Aspen were the first all new design to fully embrace the dilution
Don’t remember the Aspen Sunrise at all, but I do remember print ads for the Volare showing the Funrunner with a Roadrunner and the Sunrunner, a coupe with a T-top roof. As for the retouched photos, I have also seen pictures in sales brochures changed to reflect model year changes as well. With Chrysler being so short of cash in the late 70’s I imagine everything got recycled that could be. During that time Chrysler shot a lot of promotional videos for dealership sales staff around the Palm Springs area and I believe that many ad photos were stills from those videos.
Yeah, something weird going on with the lighting and retouching. I’m assuming several shots of the Volare were taken, of which these two were chosen. They look like they’re taken either early or late in the day, with the sun shining from the left as evidenced by the models, the trees, and the shadow underneath the car. And yet the rear panel of the car is as bright as the sides. The Volare was clearly the only car on set; the Aspen taillights look drawn in and the “Aspen” badge on the fender is almost invisible. For a limited-production model like the Aspen Sunrise it probably didn’t pay to actually change the taillights and badge though it wouldn’t have been all that hard. Still, this was the norm in the pre-Photoshop era, when sharp-eyed readers would sometimes notice last year’s car with this year’s minor change(s) airbrushed in.
And GM gets the bad rap for blatant badge engineering…
In 1978 the different GM divisions still had some degree of autonomy, producing somewhat distinctive vehicles. But Plymouth and Dodge were simply two different brand names for identical products.
I’d suggest the badge engineering got even worse with the Plymouth Horizon and Dodge Omni. At least there were some distinct differences to the trim packages offered on the Volare and Aspen. The Volare Premier wagon for example, offered a chrome and matte black finish trim surround for the bodyside faux woodgrain. While the Aspen Special Edition wagon offered a faux light wood surround. And the Aspen’s Custom exterior chrome trim was higher on the car’s bodyside, than the Volare.
The Aspen taillights are lacking a lot of real world depth the Volare ones have, they’re very cartoonish with an uncanny valley effect. I never knew about these limited editions, but the mid to late 70s seemed to be all about limited editions, Volare/Aspens seemed to mirror the Mustang II stripe and trim packages
I love these head scratcher airbrush jobs, here’s a good one I had noticed; Same specification car, same location, same dress, possibly same model. Different color, different pose, different hairdo.
Hmm
From the pre-photoshop era (and hats off to the late Charles Burki):
…
Remarkably well done. I studied illustration and graphic design, and there is a tremendous amount of work involved here. Both in the original illustration. And the edited version.
I’ve learned about Charles Burki through his work for DAF. But he did many other things too, just an example below.
His son is a designer working for Porsche; so I’ve been told at the DAF Museum, a few years ago.
Wow! Thank you for sharing this Johannes. I love his work.
As Bob mentioned, there was a range of ‘runners’. Attached is that ad.
That’s it, thanks! I wanted a Roadrunner with the 360.
As a little kid during this era, I recall some of the worst commercial photo retouching was done on photos used for professional sports trading cards. Particularly for some of the newest expansion teams. Like the Seattle Mariners and Toronto Blue Jays. Every player obviously played in another city the previous season. So, all their caps and uniforms were airbrushed/handpainted with logos and colours of their new teams. Often with dreadful results.
Bill Singer’s botched cap logo, and Minnesota Twins uniform top.
What I find very ironic, is that for all the blatant badge engineering between the Aspen and Volare, there didn’t seem to be much negative feedback at the time to deter Chrysler. As two of the first major products of the New Chrysler Corporation were badge engineered very similarly to the Aspen and Volare. In fact, the grilles on the Aries and Reliant strongly resembled the grilles on the Aspen and Volare. Some of the trim packaging was similar as well, to the F bodies. As the bodies on the new FWD compacts were otherwise, identical. Like the cars they replaced.
Having worked at both the Dodge and Plymouth dealers from 59 to 88, I have only this to say, those names were not model names but possibly regional ‘tag’ names to influence sales of vehicles not very popular throughout their production life.
Those taillights on the Aspen are definitely retouched in on the original image of the Volare. I would also venture to guess that the lovely young woman was also added after the fact. You don’t see any of her body through the window slats on the quarter window, and she mysteriously does not have a shadow.
This practice of retouching was done well into the 80s and probably beyond until Photoshop (the digital version) replaced it. This image shows the Ford Tempo from the 1985 brochure and the 1986 brochure. Ford was going to put the 15″ wheels from the Escort GT on the Tempo GL Sport (and same with the Topaz GS Sport) in 1985. But a last minute change after the original brochures were photographed removed the 15″ wheels. In the 1986 brochure, Ford used the exact same image but had the 14″ 7-spoke wheels retouched onto the image.
Forgot to attach the image.