Remembering Japanese cars from the past
The first thing that came into my mind when I saw the photo of the cassette below was: did Paul Newman sing a Nissan Langley song?.
Fortunately not!
This B-side of a Paul Newman cassette called Skyline Image Song Graffiti is called Hey! Paula and was a great hit by Paul and Paula. Nissan used it for their 1982 Nissan Langley commercial:
Continue readingOne of my favorite tools to find new things is Google Images. I was searching for photos of a Paul Newman Skyline but bumped into a set of photos of Paul Newman with a red Nissan Skyline GT-ES Turbo at the Floria Memory site taken in May 1982 around the Fort Gates Ferry in Floria.
This obviously triggered my curiosity and I started digging into the subject. ;)
I suspected at first this was just footage for one of the famous New-man Skyline ads from 1982, but for some reason I could not remember seeing this ferry in any of them:
Continue readingI just happened to stumble accross this 1980 or 1981 Nissan Skyline advertisement:
It includes Paul Newman who was involved heavily with the New Skyline advertisements by Nissan. What puzzles me is why they put this fake Super Silhouette R30 in the picture while the Hasemi Skyline KDR30 was actually more impressive than this rendering…
Music from commercials always have been successful if the product caught on. This was especially the case for the Nissan Skyline in Japan: apparently there were many vinyl records, cassette tapes and CDs sold with the music of the Skyline commercials.
Kayou is a collector of these items and put pictures of them on Minkara:
Nissan Skyline Turbo vinyl record
Click here if you are curious how the Nissan Skyline Turbo sounds,
And what would a collection be without the full Paul Newman cassette collection?
Nissan Skyline Paul Newman cassettes
See here for some of the different Paul Newman commercials.
And let’s not forget the most important one:
Nissan Skyline Ken & Mary CD
Ken and Mary! You can find their commercials here.
I really envy Kayou: gems like this swap hands for loads of money on Auctions Yahoo nowadays…
Half of me said WTF?! while the other half of me said Brilliant!
Paul Newman sticker
Yes, the Skyline R30 is terrific!
I found the sticker here at zeki’s blog @ minkara. Another four stickers can be found there as well!
I read the news yesterday and Japanese Nostalgic Car blogged about this as well: Paul Newman passed away.
Apart from many good movies he made he was also quite close to Nissan: he raced several Datsuns during the 60s and 70s and in the early 80s he even got a special edition Nissan Skyline R30 with his name on it (rebadged GT-EX) and featured the ads for them:
Another small detail: the last Skyline R30 in the ads features the Plasma FJ engine which I blogged about in May this year:
http://www.banpei.net/content/nissan-silvia-bs110-rs240-rally
Therefore it should be a Skyline RS in the ad.
I think there was no greater tribute in his life than this. ;)
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