Join the swing to Swept Wing with Lawrence Welk and the gang as they pitch the 1957 Swept Wing Dodge.
The celebrity spokesperson was a marketing tradition at the old Chrysler Corporation. The most famous, of course, was Groucho Marx for the DeSoto brand, but the practice continued well into the Lee Iacocca era with Ricardo Montalban, Jack Jones, and Frank Sinatra. At Dodge in the 1950s, the front man was the familiar champagne music maker, Lawrence Welk. In fact, for a time his ABC televirion show was called the “Dodge Dancing Party,” and in this spot, Welk and his longtime announcer Lou Crosby are pitching the Swept Wing 1957 Dodge. “Join the swing to Swept Wing,” Welk declares. The license plates on his own company-provided Dodges read “A1 AN A2.”
Swept Wing was the Dodge label for Virgil Exner’s dramatic Forward Look styling theme in ’57, with its low roofline, sweeping tailfins, and quad-look headlamps. The selling story here includes Torsion-Aire ride, Torqueflite push-button automatic transmission, and Lockheed Full Contact brakes. Not mentioned is the solid selection of engines for ’57, from the 230 CID L-head six to the 354 CID D-501 V8 with 340 hp. Dodge enjoyed a fairly decent year in 1957 with more than 288,000 cars sold, and maybe this campaign, “the Lawrence Welk 30-Day Selling Spree,” had some part in that. Video follows.
This was back in the era when “Chrysler Engineering” really meant something. Hot style, hot motors (including turbine research), hot chassis setup with those terrific torsion bars. Chrysler products sold at such a pace in the late ’50s that quality of construction took a backseat. Oh, such beauty, but so subject to rust too.
It was a big year for rust on Chrysler products. Briggs went out of business and Chrysler had to learn how to build bodies.