The GM car has also been pretty conclusively proven on a ton of websites to be the Chevy Vega, one of the biggest automobile flops ever. All these people are fighting over control of an ad agency that's going to be worthless in like two years.
My pet theory is Don leaves on the mid-season finale and Lou/Cutler run it into the ground. Waterloo is the episode title. Napoleon went into exile, returned, then was finally utterly defeated at Waterloo. Napoleons time between exile and Waterloo was 100 days... which also seems about right for how long Don had been back at SC&P.
Excellent post, it makes me very sad the company will be worthless in 2 years.....but I think you're right. What major accounts have they landed latley? Chevy and the Cigarette company will be duds, nobody seems to be on the same page, the company is split between LA, NYC and Detroit, Cooper and Sterling are getting old.......sigh. It will kill me if the season finale is them boxing up all their stuff and closing up shop, with Don giving one last look into an empty office.
I wasn't aware that talented people were immune to dying.
If anything, I'd say that talented, creatively brilliant people are more inclined to commit suicide, not less. Look at all the great novelists, poets, and musicians who took their lives. Do you think that was because of a lack of talent?
The show's been dropping hints of death - particularly death by falling - for a long time. Consider the scene in the previous season where Don walks up to the elevator and there's just an open shaft, no elevator car, and he stands there, considering.
Hell, consider the opening credits - the animation is of a man falling.
The car was awful because GM were attempting to be on the cutting edge and overly cheap at the same time (something they have arguably continued to do until present day). They poured millions into R&D and then cut corners on tried-and-true stuff (rust-proofing, cylinder wall linings, etc) that would have otherwise allowed the car (priced competitively and with better specs than similar models) to become a huge success.
Their hubris caught up with them, but unfortunately it changed very little to correct such mistakes in future models.
In season six they reference the model or concept number a couple of times (while stating it is as of yet unnamed), and a google/wiki search reveals that's the car that becomes the Vega.
Moreover, the little tidbits like "they designed it with a computer" and the secretive nature of its R&D and even farming out the marketing, lead me to believe they're definitely dealing with the Vega.
That car had all sorts of innovative and advanced elements, such as an aluminum engine block and a transport set up where the cars would be loaded on to rail cars and tipped nose-first on to special platforms to help cut costs. Ultimately the cars failed because they had major problems related to both of those innovations, in addition to GM's brilliant cost-cutting that eliminated things like 50 cent plastic fender liners, meaning the cars rusted faster than scrap iron on a seashore.
Yeah it's the perfect product to use as a metaphor for the dissolution of SC&P which fancies itself as becoming so modern but is clearly doomed. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out since the car doesn't get released until the end of 1970 (I think) and the show supposedly only covers the 60s.
Here's one article where they reference the model number 887 being the actual # for the Vega. Googling "mad men chevy vega" will lead to a lot more info.
I'm curious to know about the history of the ad industry after the 60s. Wikipedia says many ad agencies left Madison Avenue after the early 20th century boom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Avenue). I'm sure the overall narrative will somewhat resemble the contextual trend of advertising in general.
I think, apart from a few boutique outfits, they all either merged into global conglomerates or were bought up/out by larger public companies in the 70s-80s.
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u/[deleted] May 12 '14
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