Film Friday: A Wonderful New World of Fords has descended from the heavens!

In a day when every automaker seems to be eager to latch on to the smallest details -- a few pounds of weight shaved here and there, some silly feature designed to keep you and your family protected in an accident, a flashier infotainment setup -- to sell their product, this 1960 Ford spot is a breath of fresh air.

There's none of this oh-so-carefully hedged “our cars are pretty OK!” nonsense in this spot for the 1960 Thunderbird, Falcon and Galaxie. There's nary a world about fuel economy (OK, one mention -- the Falcon supposedly gets up to 30 mpg). The cars don't even move -- imagine that in a commercial today! Instead, Ford simply and shamelessly plows ahead with the “our 1960 cars are totally new and completely wonderful, trust us” bit for three minutes. They really go all-in selling this one.

And you know what? Thanks to the lush, orchestral backing music and heavenly chorus, we don't even care that the Thunderbird was not, in fact, all-new for 1960. We want to believe that the Thunderbird, Galaxie and Falcon are, indeed, “beautiful from every point of view. Worth more from every point of value (ho ho!).”

This is advertising. This is how you sell cars. If the redesigned Ford Focus descends to our earthly plane surrounded by a haze of Hannah-Barbera-animated sparkles in an upcoming TV spot, you'll know from whence the ad-men's divine inspiration came.

By Graham Kozak