In these dark times, I find it is helpful to submerge myself in a bath of liquid car-nostalgia. I forget my pain and my troubles by going back to an era when people wanted nothing more than two doors, a silky smooth inline-six engine, plush leather seats, and extremely questionable business models. Friend, let’s go back to Japan’s Bubble Era for a moment.
We at Jalopnik are great fans of the Japanese auto industry in the 1980s and part of the 1990s, when it was flush with cash and everything was possible, from gull-wing kei cars to twin-turbo exotic coupes. We Americans were lucky to get the good Supras and RX-7s and 300ZX-es, but there was so much more to it than that! And YouTuber Lone Star Drift made a 30-minute supercut of the ads for them.
In this video you’ll see commercials for some of our favorites, like the Chaser, various Celicas, the MR2, the Leopard, the NSX, a bunch of Skylines, and some later heroes like the S2000. Truly this was a better time.
At last, I understand what it must have been like to see a Toyota Soarer ad flash across your TV screen during the breaks on Abunai Deka, making you say, “I gotta get me one of those.”