Vintage Iacocca Ad: Be The Best

Chrysler boss Iacocca gave it to us straight, see.

By Gunnar Heinrich | IMG YouTube – See video below

THIS video is a trip and it’s almost scary to see the parallels.

In this 1:30 US commercial from 1984, Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca pulls us and himself up by the bootstraps implementing a particularly old school kinda bravado or cantakery – “when you been kicked in the head like we have…”

Mr. Iacocca uses his moment on camera to link America’s future with Chrysler while pitching the public a new kind of Chrysler from a company “that had one foot in the grave” - while gesturing to all those old K-cars and Caravans that are today rusting in your local landfill. 

In a roaming, scene-to-scene dialogue  that I’m almost sure Dan Aykroyd channeled to play Ray Zalinski in Tommy Boy, we see Mr. Iacocca walk through an assembly line, punch up a high-tech image of a Chrysler diagram for a car that will “beat the Japanese at their game” and promise to be better than the best – “B.M.Dubya, Audi, even Mercedes”. 

Oh, if he only knew then…

“Hard work. Commitment. The stuff that America was made of. Without them, there is no future.”