Happy Veteran’s Day, everyone! To observe this holiday and honor our brave fighting and organizing and cooking and repairing and logisticating veterans, we’re giving everyone a half-day, which I’m sure is what veterans would want. But before we do that, I want to talk about something I noticed on a wonderful Muntz Jet I happened to encounter recently, something barely veteran-related, but enough for me to use that as the thinnest possible justification for this morning’s Cold Start.
There’s a lot to say about the Muntz Jet, and we’ll likely be doing more content about this remarkable car in the nearish future, but for now I just want to focus on one detail, one that relates to the incredible personality behind the car, Early “Madman” Muntz.
First, though, let’s talk a bit about the car, because it’s a deeply interesting car.
The Muntz Jet actually started life as a Kurtis Sport Car, an aluminum two-seater designed and developed by Frank Kurtis, of race car-building Kurtis Kraft fame. These cars didn’t sell (only about 17 were built), and so Kraft sold the rights and tooling to the car for a pretty dirt-cheap price.
Muntz stretched the car to include a rear seat, making it more of a fast touring car than an outright sports car, and the cars started out as aluminum with a Cadillac V8, but later versions switched to steel construction with a Lincoln V8.
Muntz built and sold the jet between 1949 and 1954, building some in Glendale, California, and Evanston and Chicago, Illinois. Living up to his “madman” persona, each Jet sold for about $5,500 (around $67,000 today), but cost around $1,000 to build, which is not really great for business. About 198 Jets were built, losing Muntz a good bit of money.
But let’s stick with this “Madman” idea, because that’s what I want to talk about; the “madman” persona was one that Muntz cultivated in his roles as a seller of low-priced televisions, where he started that trend of retailers being “crazy” for selling top-notch goods at prices so low they’d have to be nuts! And he really did sell things cheap: Muntz developed the first television under $100, and actually popularized the term “TV” for “television,” allegedly getting the idea because skywriters took to long to spell out “television.”
Oh, and he named his daughter “Tee Vee.” For realsies.
Back to the bit I want to talk about: it’s there in the center of the steering wheel, the little cartoon icon Madman Muntz used for his businesses. Take a look at how he’s dressed:
He’s wearing a bicorn hat, better known as a “Napoleon hat.” He’s wearing one because for the better part of a century, being “crazy” was associated with someone thinking they were Napoleon.
I remember this trope very well from my childhood, as it often showed up in cartoons; if someone was crazy, they’d shove their hand in their shirt and wear a hat that looked like one of those hats, and go around claiming to be Napoleon.
Hell, look at this old ad for Goofy Grape, part of Pilsbury’s “Funny Face” series of powdered-crap drinks designed to compete with Kool-Aid:
Look at that: the crazy grape is wearing a Napoleon hat because, duh, he’s a crazy grape!
So, where did this all come from? Napoleon wasn’t exactly relevant in the mid-20th century, so why were we still suggesting mentally disturbed people thought they were the French emperor?
Well, there’s some pretty good theories and explanations about that. Essentially, it comes down to this: grandiose delusions (GD) are a known thing among people with certain conditions, where people believe themselves to be incredibly important and powerful. Often this manifests itself as a person believing they are some well-know historical figure, like Jesus or some king, or, yes Napoleon.
Napoleon-based GDs were most popular when Napoleon himself was popular, in the early-to-mid 1800s, which was also the same time that the nascent science of psychiatry, so it became pretty well-documented.
Napoleon had a well-known popular cultural personality, haughty and loud and quick to anger and forceful, all things one could easily emulate should you believe you were Napoleon.
For whatever reason, this association of GD and Napoleon persisted throughout the 1800s and into the 1900s, where it started to be portrayed in early movies and then cartoons and comics. By the 1930s to 1940s, it was a well-establish trope, and it lumbered on well into the 1970s, just because of iconic momentum, even though Napoleon was hardly an influential figure anymore, having been exiled to St.Helena in 1815 after his defeat at Waterloo, and then, in an even worse blow to his ability to influence people, he made the poor PR decision to become dead in 1821.
So, in the 1940s and 1950s, you could still stick a guy in a Napoleon hat and everyone would know that meant that dude was off his rocker. Hence the Madman Muntz’ choice of headgear!
I think this has largely died off today, but there’s still echoes of it, occasionally. Personally, I think there’s something oddly charming about it, but that’s probably nostalgia talking. And the booze.
Oh, and since Napoleon was technically a veteran himself, that’s my tenuous connection to Veterans’ Day, which I still hope you have a great one.
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