Midweek Matinee: Styling and the Experimental Car, 1964

All photos are frame grabs from video below.

“The search for beauty never ends.”  That’s the appropriate last line of this Ford-centric tribute to the humble yet essential Automotive Stylist, a job title that garners the adoration of the masses (rarely) and scathing critiques of reviewers (regularly). We are encouraged to believe that civilization’s entire history of art and technology led  to the design of the Mustang and its contemporary concept car stable mates: A wee bit of a stretch, perhaps.

Edited to 10 minutes, this would have been great. But it’s 16-plus, and given numerous image breaks and soundtrack skips, this one will strain your patience. But gemstones are typically buried in big piles of dirt, so get over it.

Allegro: strong on Mustang design cues, and its cantilevered steering wheel is fun.

The fastback Cougar II GT was designed to rocket two passengers to 170 MPH.

The Aurora grocery-getter boasted a clamshell tailgate/liftgate for the rear-facing way-back, a thermo-electric combination oven and refrigerator (and beverage cooler) adjacent to a curved sofa seating three, and a fully swiveling front passenger seat.

The Mustang II concept gets a mention: Please watch your head upon entering.

All we need to do here is to unite art and technology by incorporating the principles of beauty, shape, proportion, ornamentation, material, texture, color, function, pattern, space, rhythm, safety and comfort of the occupants, all while hitting the price point for our targeted marketplace buyer. On deadline. Listening to that jazzy music. No problem for our fearless Ford automotive stylists.

Public domain archival footage courtesy of the Internet Moving Images Archive, in association with Prelinger Archives.