ABSTRACT
The Oldsmobile can properly be caned the first motorised vehicle to really replace the horse and buggy as a popular medium of transportation in American society. It was also one of the first cars featured in an animated advertisement. 1 Simple and affordable, the car still spoke to the folk culture of America while at the same time embodying the progressive spirit of the industrial age. The early pioneers of car-automation in the United States were essentially machinists, toolworkers, mechanics - people struggling with a new medium, not merely in engineering, but of creative expression. In many senses, this echoed the rise of the cinematic apparatus, and the emerging tension between perfecting the mechanism by which progress could be achieved, and monitoring its discernable outcomes and effects. The car harnessed the internal combustion engine to a chassis for passengers; one small step for automotive history, one giant leap for social change. The cinema, in the first instance, erred towards the persuasive novelty of merely recording 'reality'; a documentary tendency that coincidentally monitored the impact of the machine upon mass culture, for example, in Edison's Automobile Parade (1905). It was not long before both the car and the camera became subordinated to the twin principles of twentieth century socialisation - used as tools to reflect and sublimate repressed desires while encouraging material consumption and the demands of commerce. It is at this juncture that the animated film enters the equation, offering insights about the codes and conditions by which the car articulates its culture.
