Video: 1964 Ford Torino — Before the Mustang was the Mustang

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For at least one brief moment within the Ford Motor Company, the name Torino was considered for the 1965 Ford Mustang. Here’s the evidence in a rare and fascinating preliminary marketing clip.

 

We don’t know how seriously Ford Motor Company considered the name Torino for the Mustang before it was introduced at the New York World’s Fair on April 17, 1964. It could be just a place holder in this rare marketing clip, which comes to us courtesy of Ford Heritage at the National Motor Museum in Great Britain. We don’t know this either, but it looks like the marketing staff was having some fun experimenting with theme music, narration, and other elements of the upcoming introduction. The core of the Mustang marketing campaign is here, but in prototype form.

Ford pondered numerous names before settling on Mustang, including Allegro, Avventura, and T-Bird II, reportedly a favorite of Henry Ford II. Along with Torino, one leading contender through much of the program was Cougar, and if you look closely in the video at around the two-minute mark, you can see a stylized cat mascot in the center grille emblem—as shown in the styling studio photo above—instead of the familiar chrome pony. And as we know, the names Cougar and Torino would later find their way onto other Ford products. Anyway, here’s a fascinating peek at the Mustang before it was the Mustang.

 

12 thoughts on “Video: 1964 Ford Torino — Before the Mustang was the Mustang”

  4. You always learn something. I thought it was the Mustang, right out of the chute. They sure needed to work with the sound; that classical stuff would’ve had problems selling a limo to a millionaire.

    • The humble Falcon was the basis for Torino, Ranchero, Mustang Cougar, Fairmont and Fairlane as well.
      Then the Grand Torino was a Galaxie with different badges, just to confuse things a bit more.
      And these Falcon base cars were built in various guises all over the world. And early 60s Falcons were still being made in Argentina up until quite recently. Here in Oz that basic platform and suspension design was still in use until the mid 90s on utes and Vans. Ford got well over 3 decades [or 5 for Argentina] from that base design

    • That’s a real production Ford Falcon. The Falcon name switched to the base Fairlane platform halfway through 1970 and the regular Falcon was discontinued in preparation for the upcoming similar sized Maverick. Nothing unusual about that Hemmings car nor was it particularly rare at the time. May be rare now, as not many stripper cars are preserved.

      Man, that reveal out of the mist took forever. They could have safely edited twenty seconds out of that. With the mirage illusion, it looked like the car had three foot ground clearance and was too softly sprung. Poorly executed in my opinion, but it was just for the dealers so no real harm done.

      • There are some very rare 70 Torino based Falcons. You could order them with some pretty poweful powertrain setups.

    • Following the discontinuance of the ’66-’69 Falcon body, the Falcon name was applied to the base Fairlane/Torino body in the coupe body. Oddly enough the lowly stripped Falcon was available with the 429 engine option, which made for a great drag car or a sleeper on the street.

  6. I hear about these base models with big motors being great drag cars, but realistically how much weight are you saving? 100 pounds? I’ve tried paring weight from cars before and it is incredibly difficult to shed more than 150 pounds by just removing standard parts. That gets you a tenth of a second.

    • Difficult work to reduce vehicle weight, maybe. But if you win the race by a tenth of second…isn’t that what (drag) racing is all about?

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