Frazz by Jef Mallett for February 23, 2025

When wags started referring to the Edsel as having a very vulgar rhyming word for the female anatomy in the front, it was doomed!

If can, can. If no can, no can.

I thought it was ugly. But then I find quite a few cars ugly including at least one (a Prius) that we own. And the wag comment that I heard was “Looks like an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon”… which it did.

A Caulfield moment?

I find the Elon Musk Tesla Cybertruck incredibly ugly besides my low opinion of the company president.

I’m generally not into the style that GM comes out with or any of the MOPAR autos. Some exceptions include the 57 Chevy, some of the early Corvettes and the Dodge Challenger. I also agree Ford has had issues with style but the Mustang, is in my eyes, has one of the most awesome looks in a car. I currently drive a Fusion, which I also think looks good while my wife drives an Escape, which looks like ALL of the other brands.

I was too young to drive or buy a car, but the Edsel failed because of its name. It just didn’t fit in a song or jingle.

The Edsel wasn’t a good car, it was produced cheaply (even for US standards), had massive quality issues and spare parts were hard to get.

This comic always makes me think, and I love the back and forth viewpoints.

It was certainly better looking than all the clones on the market today.

Vehicles today all look the same because of fuel efficiency requirements and aerodynamics gives you very little wiggle room.

The Edsel was named after Henry Ford’s son, Edsel Bryant Ford.

The public’s perception is stronger than truth, which is how we got here. Wherever YOU think that is.

Vincent Price to Red Skelton: “Here you go, a cup of tea and a toy car.” Red: “What’s the car for?” Price: “It’s an Edsel. You need a lemon for your tea.”

Perhaps it’s just me, but in the last panel, it sure looks as if though Caulfield hurled a pen or a straw or something narrow and sleek at Mrs. Olsen. It’s as if he had two items in his hand, chose to keep the pencil, and threw the other item. I actually rubbed my screen a couple of times to make sure it wasn’t any random piece of lint stuck to my screen.

Actually, Ford’s heirs didn’t have that much to do with the Edsel. Ford had gone public a couple of years earlier, and their role in the company’s decision-making was diluted. The new suits saw that the company had nothing to compete with Cadillac and Chrysler’s Imperial. They repositioned the Lincoln—which had been competing with Oldsmobile, Buick, and DeSoto—as Ford’s premium brand, and brought in the Edsel to take its place.

That’s not to say that the Hank the Deuce was completely sidelined, or that he made sound decisions. He resisted Lee Iacocca and Hal Sperlich in their development of the Mustang, and fired Sperlich when he became too persistent in pushing the idea of a minivan…whereupon Sperlich took the idea to Chrysler, where Iacocca followed him.

You’re a bad person if you have Adolph Hitler’s portrait on the wall of your office. You’re a really bad person if Hitler has your portrait on his wall. Hitler had Ford’s portrait on his wall.

“I don’t think I’ll ever catch your drifts.”

Snow joke.

Henry Ford was a vehement anti-semite who bought a newspaper just to publish the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other screeds against Jews.

An ultra-rich automobile manufacturer buying a social media platform to spew racist hate? The parallels are striking.

Now we know what “Butt Ugly” looks like.

The Edsel was quite ugly (Ford did no market research ahead of time to see if customers actually liked (or disliked) the design.

The Edsel had many design and engineering problems (i.e., was in the shop a lot).

There were a few other factors in it’s demise, but I think #1 was it was just really, really ugly.

Lead sl . . . . .ed. Almost

The Ford Motor Company had Ford, Mercury and Lincoln. They brought the Edsel in to be between the Mercury and Lincoln brands. While 1958 Edsels introduced multiple advanced features for the price segment, the launch of the model line became symbolic of commercial failure. Introduced in a recession that catastrophically affected sales of medium-priced cars, Edsels were considered overhyped, unattractive, distinguished by a vertical grille said to resemble a horse collar, and low quality.

I think it failed because of all the lady parts jokes.

I have to hand it to Ford: After all the bad press of the Edsel, the Pinto, and other failures, it’s still “leading the way.”

Once again, Caulfield’s cleverness misses the mark. Being wrong about the potential success of one thing you are doing isn’t a disproof of the saying; not to mention, most sayings of that nature are to be taken as a “rule of thumb,” not a precise absolute.

Henry Ford also said: ""Say, what do I care about Napoleon? What do we care about what they did 500 or 1,000 years ago? I don’t know whether Napoleon did or did not try to get across and I don’t care. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk." I’ll bet teacher never brings up THAT quote in class. :)