Also questionable is the choice for convex curves that end with… Tell my mother I love her and I died doing what I loved: Photographing strange beasts in the wilds of South Berkeley.Īs we flee, umm, move on to a examination of the disconnect between the front and rear, we notice the lantern jaw of a front bumper that dangles like a shelf off of the front end. I think seventeen rows of sharp teeth lie behind there. I don’t think a 361 Wedge V8 slumbers behind that hood. At any moment it looks like this face could come alive and devour me in a torturous death. I’m surprised I got this close to take a picture. Then there’s the cheese grater grille pattern with that gold emblem.
The grille has a “pinched waist.” The hood starts to flow down and then abruptly stops. But it was the one that possibly caused the most nightmares.Īs we pull back from those furrowed eyebrows, I can’t help but notice how inharmonious the whole front end is. The 1959 Buick opened the door to many an aggressive face, and the 1961 Plymouth wasn’t the only furrowed brow scowling out of showrooms across the United States in 1961. In an era in which Pontiac was leading the way of showing off your shoes by pushing them to “wide track” dimensions and offering 8 lug exposed aluminum drums to dress the whole thing up, the Plymouth seems decidedly retrograde.Īnd then there’s that Science Fiction face. For one thing, there’s a healthy dose of the “crab legs” tread stance that make many a 1950s General Motors car seem like a sumo wrestler with small feet. Something is remarkably out of proportion with the Plymouth. And the Chrysler wasn’t too ugly if you didn’t look it in the eye. Then you realize that the Dodges were pretty clean in general. The Plymouth doesn’t initially seem all that out of the ordinary. Pretty much all Mopars were, in some form or other, fashion freaks this year: from the reverse fin Dodges, the cock-eyed Chryslers and the neo-classical free-standing headlamp Imperial. “Ladies and Gentlemen, I introduce you to the 1961 Plymouth Mothra….
#PLYMOUTH FURY FULL#
Virgil Exner just took a pair of scissors to the rear end, hammered on some concave rear fenders and put a heavy dose of eyebrow pencil over the headlights of the 1961 full sized Plymouth cars and called it a wrap. With the runaway success of more stoic compacts such as the Falcon, Ford and Chevrolet shed the frills of the 1950s with haste to introduce rather clean 1961 designs. All of the design excesses of full sized cars began to seem obsolete for 1960. Only the Ford 4 door hardtops made any design leaps into the present with rather clean side details and the blind C-pillar borrowed from the 1958 Thunderbird. Given that contemporaries from General Motors weren’t all that much more forward thinking in design, it didn’t seem like a bad move. So the full line of Mopar offerings minus the all new Valiant showcased an evolution of the Forward Look. When Chrysler switched everything but the Imperial to unit body construction in 1960, apparently it wanted to prove that what it showed customers in the fall of 1956 was really what 1960 would look like. And the 1961 Plymouth full sized line was one of the most mutant of them all. Whatever the aliens did had a profound impact on what appeared in Mopar showrooms in 1961. Sometime between 19, Chrysler’s design studio must have been captured by aliens. ( first posted ) Had it been October of 1960, and I was standing at a Plymouth dealership, the title of this post would have been the first words out of my mouth.
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