The 61st Academy Awards ceremony took place on Wednesday, March 29, 1989, with the disastrous appearance of a live-action Snow White and Rob Lowe parody in the opening number.
However, even though probably every viewer was more concerned about who won what Oscar, that broadcast was also the premiere of a one-minute commercial titled “Premiere,” introducing Chevrolet's new Lumina at the Disney-MGM Studios (set to open May 1, 1989). The commercial featured animated Disney characters touting the virtues of the new car at a black-tie live action Hollywood movie premiere in front of the Chinese Theater. You can see the full commercial and a selection of other short spots.
The North American Chevrolet Lumina became a popular-selling car when it first officially appeared in April 1989, despite some criticism about the lateness of its introduction to the market. The Chevrolet Lumina's first generation (that included a mid-sized four-door sedan, a two door coupe, and an All-Purpose Vehicle minivan that could seat up to seven people) ended production in August 1994, making this the shortest-lived generation of the first-generation GM W-body cars.
All three cars were showcased in the premiere commercial with Mickey Mouse (in a white tuxedo so he stood out against the black background of the car), Minnie (in an elegant white gown), Donald Duck, Daisy Duck and Pluto exiting the first car; Goofy (also in a white tuxedo) and Donald's nephews (Huey, Dewey and Louie) coming out of the second; and the Seven Dwarfs popping out of the minivan.
They were all unloaded on a red carpet while rows of appreciative fans on either side of the carpet eagerly applauded them and the newest cars.
Chevrolet signed a deal with Disney to make the 1990 Lumina the company's Official Car, with a specific association with the Disney-MGM Studios theme park. GM did not want to depend solely on technological wizardry or elegant traditional styling to win over customers from its major competitor, Ford, and hoped to see 350,000 units sold annually. The car was positioned as an alternative to Ford's Taurus.
In order to achieve these marketing goals, Chevy linked up with the Disney Company to help incorporate some of the Disney magic charisma, as well as to stimulate awareness of the Lumina name. In addition, Chevy felt the cost was worth it to position itself to the type of families who loved Disney.
General Motors' share of the American car market had dropped significantly in 1988 for the first time in 35 years, so there needed to be a major attention-grabbing publicity push. In addition, Japanese car makers were making inroads with bigger and more luxurious mid-sized cars, aimed at the same families who were visiting Disney parks and buying Chevrolets.
All Lumina advertising, both print and TV, was initially filmed and photographed at Disney-MGM Studios theme park, which, besides the sizeable licensing fee Disney was to receive, was one of the major reasons Disney agreed to the deal, to help publicize its new theme park. The arrangement was for Disney characters to appear in ads to explain the car's features. In the past, GM only used joint marketing primarily as sweepstakes prizes.
“We were afraid people might be offended by Mickey and Minnie asking them to spend as much as $14,000 for a car,” said Stephen McAvoy, a Chevrolet marketing manager to The New York Times. “But our testing showed that Mickey and Minnie brought tremendous believability to our product.”
Counting on the connection with Disney in its advertising was seen as a risky move for Chevy, who was hoping for greater visibility and attention but worried that the use of the characters might blur the focus of the specific advantages of the car being sold.
The Seven Dwarfs pop out of a minivan and walk the red carpet in the Lumina commercial.
“I would have concentrated more on hyping the car as much as possible with an uncluttered background,” said Christopher Cedegren of J. D. Power & Associates, a California automotive consulting firm. “This campaign may overshadow the car itself.”
McAvoy responded: “Disney characters are very powerful. We were forewarned that if we overused Mickey and Minnie the customer wouldn't remember the car.”
To lessen this potential danger, the creative department of Campbell Ewald, Chevrolet's ad agency, chose some lesser-known Disney characters to perform in some of the 15-second advertisements, instead of using the Fab Five. Chevy was also conscious of using the Disney characters in ways that related their cartoon personalities to specific product features.
For example, Donald Duck's nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie, who personify the exuberance and carelessness of children, drop dripping ice cream cones on the back seat of a Lumina, but the ice cream does not stain because the upholstery is protected by Du Pont Scotchguard, a standard Lumina feature that Chevrolet believed would attract buyers.
In another ad, Dumbo the Flying Elephant demonstrates the roominess of Lumina's trunk, hoping adults would appreciate the wordplay connection between a car trunk and an elephant's trunk.
Craig MacGowan, executive producer of the commercials, had only four months to do all the commercials, including post-production. This meant putting the animated characters in the previously shot live-action scenes, in order to meet the deadline of showing the “Premiere” commercial on the Academy Awards presentation.
Live-action shooting took two weeks, and produced the 60-second premiere ad with the Disney characters at the Disney-MGM Studios' Chinese Theater for a nighttime Hollywood premiere, as well as all three Luminas. They also shot seven other 15-second daytime TV spots and a 30-second sweepstakes announcement.
Among those 15-second commercials, besides the two already mentioned, were six dancing hippos from Fantasia (1940) clad in tutus, joyfully coming out of a hotel on the backlot New York Street and easily fitting into the Lumina four-door sedan because it had such a roomy interior.
The three good fairies from Sleeping Beauty (1959) scattered magic dust around a sedan to promote the bumper-to-bumper protection warranty. Goofy on the backlot of New York Street battled typhoon force winds (perhaps coming from Typhoon Lagoon that also opened that year) and withstands them just as well as the galvanized steel body panels on the Lumina.
One spot featured Cinderella's Fairy Godmother using her magic to transform a Chevy Corvette into a Lumina sedan, because the unique rear suspension was so similar. There was even a 15-second spot severely edited from the 60-second one.
In the commercials, which were shot months before the park actually opened, notice how the archway into the animation courtyard lacks detail and there are things missing from the Chinese Theater as well.
The 60-second commercial had 18 separate scenes, and each required a different camera angle, lighting array, special effects, extras, props, and, of course, the addition of the famous Disney characters in animated form.
Even the bowtie emblems in the wheel covers of the cars needed to be properly aligned so the car was jacked up and the wheels could be turned into the right positions. This attention to detail on the product is quite common on most high-end commercials. McDonald's might go through hundreds of different hamburgers to find the right one for the final shoot, and even then might enhance it with something like a quick spray of water on the lettuce to make it appear more juicy.
When Minnie Mouse briefly checks her makeup in the gloss of the Lumina's fender, it means that the area must be polished to the highest possible mirror-like sheen in real life, reflecting other real things.
The premiere scene included approximately a 125 extras dressed in tuxedos, elaborate evening gowns, sparkling fake diamond accessories, and more that all help create the illusion of a huge Hollywood premiere at the theater.
Producer MacGowan explained that the live-action shooting was just the smallest part of the overall process to writer Don Sherman in a 1989 special issue of Friends travel magazine:
“It's called interactive animation. The actual technique that mixes live and animated film is known as 'compositing.' What we do is shoot normal film that contains the backgrounds, the props, the live action, and the special effects, such as smoke and fireworks.
“Everything BUT the animation. Of course, we must make certain accommodations for the animated characters to fit in properly. For example, if an actor in one of the segments talks to Goofy, he has to know how tall Goofy is and exactly where he will be so the conversation looks convincing in the final film. We rehearse with full size props like sometimes a cutout standee. Then, when the actor has it embedded in his mind where Goofy will be, he delivers his lines in front of a live camera without the prop.
“In the 'Premiere' commercial, a little girl offers her autograph book to one of the animated characters, and we have to make the pen move by remote control during the live part of the filming. Then when the animation is added later, it looks like Donald Duck really is signing her book!
“We knew going in that what we wanted was the 'Roger Rabbit' look. We had so little time to turn this job around that I knew we couldn't train anyone with new and difficult film techniques. What we did instead was hire the actual experts who had worked on Roger Rabbit from the award-winning cinematographer Dean Cundey (who was named director of the production) and the film editor, Artie Schmidt, to the script gal and so on.
“Luckily Cundey had the time available to work with us before he begins shooting Back to the Future II (1989). The producer's responsibility is to eliminate potential problems, so that's why I went after the best in the business.”
Director Cundey added:
“The techniques we perfected during the production of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) really let us create a very convincing illusion—that animated characters could exist in a live-action world. It goes way beyond the simple addition of flat, two-dimensional characters to a normal piece of film, which has been done many times in the past.
“What we did was develop lighting and camera techniques that together help create a far more complex illusion. The animated characters then become more lifelike. They move around the room, cast shadows, and reflect light just like a real human being would. Creating a fantasy world so real that people believe it exists is what I truly enjoy about this work.
“The differences between Roger Rabbit and this production aren't that great. Both use about 10 layers, or cels, to add the animation techniques to the regular film material. This includes the character animation, tone mats, reflection mats, shadow mats—everything you need to produce interactive animation.
“The key difference is that Roger Rabbit was all done with film while the Lumina commercials use digital electronics to make the composites. This permits us to make what amounts to camera moves in the post-production phase. With digital techniques, we can actually track (change camera position) and zoom (move in for a closer view) even though the camera was actually fixed when we shot the film.
“Digital compositing is somewhat more sophisticated than the film-to-film compositing used in Roger Rabbit in that it gives you more freedom during post-production. Unfortunately, this method doesn't yet offer the resolution that's necessary when you enlarge the image to the size of a huge movie-theater screen. Everyone says that this technology will be available someday. For right now, though, it only works in the smaller formats, such as television films.”
During the filming of the premiere commercial, a soundproofed generator truck overheated and shut down right in the middle of the major shoot one evening. That delay meant that nearly 250 people, from technicians to extras in spike heels and low-cut evening gowns, had to stand around in the famous Florida weather waiting for a replacement.
The failed generator was pulled off the power grid and three replacement units made their way to the location. In all, it took 90 minutes to get the stage lights back on.
“The real work begins in post-production,” MacGowan said.
Twelve-thousand feet of film was exposed during the Florida shoot, but would need to be edited down to roughly 300 feet or so to be used in the finished commercials. Sound tracks, animation, shading mats, and various computer-generated graphics were added during the process, which would total nearly five times the number of days of the original live-action shoot.
Once the film was edited from the raw footage by Artie Schmidt (who did some of the editing simultaneously with the live-action shooting) that rough cut had to be approved by the client. Once that was done, just like for Roger Rabbit, photostats (basically still photos) from the film were used to create frames, over which animators laid their animation paper and drew in the figures to interact with the live action since they could see where the live action was.
Again, that animation had to be approved in a rough pencil test before it was sent for the pencil drawings to be transferred to cels and ink and painted. It was estimated that the commercials required more than 5,000 animation elements with each animator providing only about three seconds of finished animation a week.
When the cels were finished, they were photographed frame-by-frame with a special 35 millimeter camera rig. Then, the final step was an outside firm taking the live-action footage, the animation and the soundtrack and doing digital-electronic compositing for something that would only be seen briefly on a TV screen and then never rerun after a few weeks of sales promotion.
Even then, color and exposure corrections were done to make everything looked as seamless as possible.
While the end of the one-minute commercial had a gleeful Mickey popping up in the left hand corner of the screen saying “See Ya Real Soon!” it was not to be. The partnership between Chevrolet and Disney ended fairly quickly, just months later, beginning in September 1989.
A marketing manager for Disney stated that the campaign, while successful and done to the standards of Disney quality, sparked concerns in upper management that the Disney characters were becoming overexposed and associated with non-Disney items.
“We want Mickey to be used as much as possible in his natural environment, and certainly never in a way that he appears to be huckstering,” said the Disney manager.
Chevy manager McAvoy said GM had been happy with the advertisements, which tied in with Disney's new theme park in Orlando, but would now explore alternate ideas with Disney for joint marketing without the characters.
Disney characters had previously appeared in a series of stylized commercials designed by Disney artist Tom Oreb for American Motors Corporation (AMC), producers of cars like the Rambler, Hudson Hornet and Wasp, in the mid-1950s. They were done by a small little-known commercial studio on the Disney Studios lot run by Disney's niece, Phyllis Bounds.
The deal was made because AMC sponsored both the weekly Disneyland television program, as well as the CirCARama attraction in Tomorrowland at Disneyland. The commercials featured Mickey Mouse and Minnie, Donald Duck and his nephews, Jiminy Cricket, B'rer Rabbit, B'rer Fox, and B'rer Bear, among others. Just like the Lumina commercials, they were short-lived just for the new car season.
So, the Lumina commercials were an interesting and well-made aberration that some Disney fans remember, while others are clueless. Hopefully, this article will shed some light on this unique collaboration.
