Someone else was mentioning something similar to this, but I thought I'd start a topic just for it.
I went to high school in the early- to mid-nineties. Right before my senior year, in September of 1995, I got my first car... a 1978 Buick Skylark.
This is not actually a picture of my car, but is a very close approximation (just make it primer brown rather than primer gray):
The car was a disaster right from the beginning... it had no front shocks left, thanks to it being used as a snowplow for somewhere around the range of eight years. The oil had never been changed in the Buick 231 V6, which had racked up 168,000 hard-earned miles. The car had never had a tuneup. The rear leaf springs were so worn down that I had to put in load leveler shocks in the back just to keep the *ss end from dragging on the ground.
Despite the problems, I loved that car. I still do. And despite the lack of a V8 or anything, the car got quite a bit of respect around my high school, if simply for the amount of time I spent making it suck less than it might otherwise. And at least it looked muscle-ish.
The rest of the kids around back then were driving similar beasts. I remember a mid-70s Trans Am, a couple of Malibus and one horrifically yellow GTO. A buddy of mine had a '66 Mustang -- you know, from back when Mustangs were actually cool -- and another had an early '70s Bonneville. There was even one guy with a carbon copy of my car... a brown '78 Oldsmobile Omega.
Something happened, then, in the few years between when I went to high school and when my brother went. My brother started his senior year in 2000, five years after I started mine. His first car was a similarly underpowered-but-cool-looking car, a 1984 Cutlass Supreme. And yet... he was ruthlessly mocked by everyone he knew for having such an "old" piece of crap. The rest of the kids -- who were from the same families and the same means as the people I went to school with -- were suddenly driving brand new cars... Mustangs and BMWs and Minis and whatnot.
He did his best to make the most of his car... he put a stereo in it, a huge box in the trunk and tried to make it cool, but in the end he broke down and bought a Cavalier, sending the poor (and fully functional!) Cutlass to the crusher.
What the hell happened to people? Did the perceptions of people change that drastically in such a short period of time? I know that a lot of people like to point out Hollywood and movies like "The Fast and the Furious", but c'mon... even that horrible movie had the decency to show that a Dodge Charger and Chevelle SS were so much better than the crap they were driving otherwise!
I went to high school in the early- to mid-nineties. Right before my senior year, in September of 1995, I got my first car... a 1978 Buick Skylark.
This is not actually a picture of my car, but is a very close approximation (just make it primer brown rather than primer gray):
The car was a disaster right from the beginning... it had no front shocks left, thanks to it being used as a snowplow for somewhere around the range of eight years. The oil had never been changed in the Buick 231 V6, which had racked up 168,000 hard-earned miles. The car had never had a tuneup. The rear leaf springs were so worn down that I had to put in load leveler shocks in the back just to keep the *ss end from dragging on the ground.
Despite the problems, I loved that car. I still do. And despite the lack of a V8 or anything, the car got quite a bit of respect around my high school, if simply for the amount of time I spent making it suck less than it might otherwise. And at least it looked muscle-ish.
The rest of the kids around back then were driving similar beasts. I remember a mid-70s Trans Am, a couple of Malibus and one horrifically yellow GTO. A buddy of mine had a '66 Mustang -- you know, from back when Mustangs were actually cool -- and another had an early '70s Bonneville. There was even one guy with a carbon copy of my car... a brown '78 Oldsmobile Omega.
Something happened, then, in the few years between when I went to high school and when my brother went. My brother started his senior year in 2000, five years after I started mine. His first car was a similarly underpowered-but-cool-looking car, a 1984 Cutlass Supreme. And yet... he was ruthlessly mocked by everyone he knew for having such an "old" piece of crap. The rest of the kids -- who were from the same families and the same means as the people I went to school with -- were suddenly driving brand new cars... Mustangs and BMWs and Minis and whatnot.
He did his best to make the most of his car... he put a stereo in it, a huge box in the trunk and tried to make it cool, but in the end he broke down and bought a Cavalier, sending the poor (and fully functional!) Cutlass to the crusher.
What the hell happened to people? Did the perceptions of people change that drastically in such a short period of time? I know that a lot of people like to point out Hollywood and movies like "The Fast and the Furious", but c'mon... even that horrible movie had the decency to show that a Dodge Charger and Chevelle SS were so much better than the crap they were driving otherwise!
) because her girlfriends wouldnt ride with her. 
