Back in the 1970s, paint worked for us, not the other way around, like today. We were once chromatic masters, commanding a wide variety of hues to coat our cars with the ruthless abandon of kudzu. Sometimes, though, the power went to our heads, and unhinged experiments were undertaken. One of those experiments occurred deep within the bowels of Chrysler’s underground chromatic labs, and the result was the 1976-1977 Dodge Charger Daytona. The Charger Daytona did some things with paint that really hasn’t been attempted since. Is it good? Is it awful? Can our simple human methods of evaluating such things even apply here? I doubt it.
Look at that picture up there; note how the sides of the car have been divided into color panels at the front and rear, creating two oblongish panels that sort of follow the lines of the car. The oblongs are ringed in contrasting color pinstriping, which continues around the windshield and side windows, and then another U-shape of striping goes from the rear fenders, over the rear window, and down the other side.
It’s odd. Breaking up the planes of the car like this usually just isn’t done, but, well, here we are.
The Charger Daytona had a striking look, and if you wanted to really check one out, it wasn’t that hard, because it only made about 145 horsepower from its big-ass V8, so it wouldn’t be too hard to catch.
You know what else is odd? It seems that there are multiple, very slightly different versions of this brochure picture of this Charger Daytona:
See how those softball players and Danny Twocollars there are in slightly different positions? Let’s demonstrate, via the magic of CompuServe’s Graphics Interchange Format:
Look at them go! Watch that bat, blondie! You could break someone’s nose!
I wonder why these two nearly identical pics taken clearly seconds apart both made it into use? Was the tone wrong on one? In the era of film, this feels like a strange choice.
Have a bitchin’ Friday, no matter what, though.
The first image is the better of the two and I bet they made the decision to darken the interior etc to make the image visually cleaner without interior clutter. However the second image is less doctored and looks better.