For this week's design tweak, I chose a 1961 Plymouth Fury 2 door hardtop.
While I find the original Exner design stunning, its contemporary
buying public didn't agree. Many automotive hacks wracked their brains
trying to colorfully describe this car—The Car that Ate Tokyo—a
riff on the Japanese horror flicks of the day, comes to mind, and they
still do to this day in classic car magazines. The "pinched" grille and
dramatic headlight placement seems to be the car's main issues, although
the suddenly finless body was referred to as a "plucked chicken" by
Exner himself. My main issues are with the details. There are fussy
chrome doodads, fussy side sculpturing and an abundance of shiny chrome
slathered in the front. Ironically, Lexus is just now introducing its
new "spindle" grille across its entire lineup, and it's almost exactly
the same shape as this '61 Plymouth. See the BTW sidebar at the end of this post. Let me describe how I "fixed" it to my own tastes.
T H E C H O P — First I "radiused" the rear wheel wells. This
means I opened up the fenders to reveal the entire wheel and tire. The
original had a very low wheel opening which didn't really relate to the
front wheel well and made the rear end look like it was dragging. I
think this change did the most for "lightening" the look of the car. I
resculpted the sides, continuing the front fender shoulder all the way
to the back of the car instead of ending it at the front door. I also
eliminated the ornate trim behind the front doors, and lowered the
entire car about 3 inches so it sat closer to the ground hugging the
tires more. At the front, I blackened-out the grille, which simplified
the look of it, and made the dramatic "swoosh" around the protruding
headlights work better. I added a satin chrome "header" above the
now-black grille, with P-L-Y-M-O-U-T-H letterspaced across it. This
serves to "rationalize" the grille shape, giving more prominence to the
horizontal aspects of it, rather than the angularity of the opening. The
front bumper was simplified too, deleting the rather baroque center
section with its five raised ridges, and I raised it a few inches so it
wasn't so close to the ground.
The original photo of the '61 Fury. Note
the odd way the front fender shoulder sculpturing stops at the front
door cutline, though the chrome trim continues. Also, just behind the
front door is a set of chrome hash marks that seem really out of place,
though they do serve as a start for a small sliver of white paint,
matching the two-toned roof. The rear of the car seems to drag, a
combination of the now-finless rear fenders and very low wheel well
opening.
BTW:
