Rocket 88

In college, I spent most of my senior year growing a red beard, which I reluctantly shaved off to perform in a community theater production in Savannah, Georgia. Frankly, it was getting too hot to wear that beard anyway.

Roughly ten years later, I tried to grow it back, only to see to my dismay that my beard was now snow white. Not ready to be married to someone who looks like her grandfather, my wife uttered one of her famous ultimatums.

"You'll have plenty of time to look old," she said as she handed me my razor.

I have found that TV advertising has a way of making you feel old, too, or at least nostalgic. In the 1950s, the Oldsmobile and its Rocket 88 engine inspired early rock and roll songs. When I was a teenager, one of the coolest cars in the world was an Oldsmobile Cutlass, especially its muscle car variant, the 442. It was another one of GM's classic attempts to transform an ordinary sedan into a sports car, and it worked. The Cutlass was the top selling car in America in the mid-1970s.

It may have been your father's Oldsmobile, but it was more graceful than the homogenized version that GM finally retired in 1999. The sixth generation Cutlass was nothing more than a re-skinned Chevrolet Malibu.

So, imagine my surprise, when I was watching the latest TV advertising promoting the new Malibu as the car you can't ignore. To prove the point, the ad folks have a female jogger run into a parked car that she does ignore.



Just in case you did not get the joke, a second ad shows a group of bank robbers who escape detection by police because they were fortunate enough to select a bland, forgettable car.

The Malibu does look like a nice car, but I could not help but stare at the poor lamented automobile that served as the butt of all this corny humor. It was an Oldsmobile.

GM used to make buses, too, which is fitting. It just threw this once proud brand under one.