What on Earth! is a 1966 Academy Award-nominated film by Les Drew and Kaj Pindal of the National Film Board of Canada. This animated short is a quirky and satirical look at life on earth as seen from a Martian perspective, proposing what many earthlings have long feared – that the automobile has inherited the planet. Watch it here.
Q: Were the Martians right?
It is a satirical look at life on earth as seen from a Martian perspective.
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Zak Stone is the Assistant Editor of GOOD, the unique media platform that produces “a quarterly magazine, online videos, and events for people who give a damn”, as their website claims. When Stone heard that General Motors was planning to phase out its Hummer vehicle a few years ago, he noted that few tears were shed. It felt, he wrote, like poetic justice for the gas-guzzling, military-turned-luxury vehicle favoured by a certain former governor of California.
So he cheered the news that a pair of Los Angeles architects may have found a way to redeem this environmentally disastrous vehicle: Continue reading
Conflict of interest disclosure time: I’ve been a sucker for Volkswagens since the day my Dad drove home that new 1960 VW microbus. I later drove VWs for 26 years – yes, even when I worked in PR for Mercedes-Benz, enduring merciless teasing as I putt-putted my VW into the Benz staff parking lot each morning.
I’ve also been a mega-fan of Volkwagen advertising over many years. Remember the classic 1960s Beetle ad that asked: “Did you ever wonder how the man who drives the snowplough gets to the snowplough?”
Or even before then, the signature Think Small campaign created by Manhattan’s Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) agency in the 1950s? This VW ad series, in fact, was ranked as the best advertising campaign of the twentieth century by Advertising Age. Continue reading
My years spent in the automotive industry (working in corporate PR for Mercedes-Benz and Porsche) taught me just enough about cars so that I know lots of trivia. For example, did you know that the 1995 Porsche 928S had an air-conditioned glove box? Men, apparently, love this kind of car talk.
And although I no longer pick up Motor Trend or European Car these days, I still have a soft spot for emerging trends in automotive sectors. Continue reading
The Ethical Nag 