From a fairly half witted answer to Chevrolet's Corvette to a seminal personal luxury car to, well, I'm not quite sure what, Ford certainly messed around with whatever they wanted their "Thunderbird" to be, didn't they? And, not unlike a song or movie that's not very good but does have a memorable name or beat, in my humble opinion, none of Ford's thirteen generations of Thunderbird ever quite lived up to it's vaunted native American inspired name. Thunderbird. What a great name for anything but from an automotive perspective, what does or did it mean?
Of all the various iterations, the most fantastically bizarre and all over the road of them were these four door "fifth generation" T-Bird's Ford rolled out between 1967 and 1969. Our subject here hails from 1967. Actually, this generation of Thunderbird went all the way to 1971 but I don't count the "Bunkie Beak" '70 and '71 models. They were called that for Pontiac honcho Bunkie Knudsen who jumped to Ford in the late sixties and insisted a huge beak be added to the front of these cars.
Funny how your first impression of anything sticks with you. When I was a kid, I thought these cars were weird as hell. And I still do. I thought the suicide door Continentals strange as well but these things were even more out there - more out there in a Munster's meet the Adam's Family kind of way. That doesn't mean they weren't strangely cool. Listen, I don't understand what people see in horror movies but I respect their opinion and I press my face against the glass doing my best to see what they see.
These big birds may look similar to the 1961-1969 suicide door Continentals but they're actually quite different. Yes, they may share some running gear and who knows what else but the Continentals where unibody, meaning the frame and body were one unit, whereas these cars were "body on frame". Body on frame automobiles tend to have a quieter, more cushy ride compared to unibody models and that played well to Ford's ever more luxurious aspirations for the Thunderbird theme.
Tart the thing up with wonky and inefficient doo-dads like windshield wipers that face each other and clumsy and complicated head light doors all you want, if it wasn't for the crazy rear hinged rear doors, this car would be nothing more than an LTD. Buyers loved them, at least at first, because they were so different from anything else on the road at the time and they were willing to pay extra for all the schmaltz and glitz. Even if they were, if anything, fairly ordinary if atypical (for the time period) automobiles.
The times, though, they were a changin'. The market for "personal luxury cars", got crowded come 1968 when sister division Mercury rolled out their inexplicably cool, Mustang based "Couger" and then GM one-two punched the whole segment with their 1969 Pontiac Grand Prix and 1970 Chevrolet Monte Carlo. Along with the flashy Buick Riviera, Oldsmobile Toronado and Cadillac Eldorado, these over-styled land yachts quickly became as outdated as saddle shoes and bobby sox.
That, in a nutshell, summed up what these cars were all about - they were fashion statements. Nothing less and, sadly, nothing more. The problem with keeping up with fashion is that whatever you have right now quickly becomes obsolete. Ford ditched the suicide door Continental come 1970 and these Thunderbirds, there was a debate-ably more tasteful coupe version of these, went the way of the leisure suit come 1972
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