Flookerang (pronounced flook–ah-rang)
A corporate
logo adopted in 1957 by Chrysler Corporation for use in promoting the
dramatically restyled versions of the company’s “Forward Look” designs
(1955-1956).
1957: The
construct was flook + (boom)erang. Now mostly
obsolete, flook was an alternative
spelling of fluke (in the sense of “blade at the end of an anchor”). In wide nautical use, flook (fluke) was used
of any of the triangular blades at an anchor’s end, the appendages there to “catch”
on the seabed or riverbed, keeping the vessel moored in position (ie not
drifting away with the tide). In
armaments design, the flook was a metal hook that appeared close to the tip of
many staff weapons (such as a bill) with the effect in combat depending on use;
if thrust, could be penetrative (armor or flesh as need be) while if swung it
could work as a “grappling hook”. Fluke
& flook are old words, documented since at least the tenth century
although, anchors, staff weapons, arrowheads and such having by then been in
use for millennia, the forms may well be more ancient. The origin was the Middle English flok, fluke & flewke, from
the Old English flōcand and cognate
with the Old Norse flōki; it may be
compared with the Old High German flah
(flat (source of the modern German flach)),
from the Proto-Germanic flakaz
although for technical reasons related to the phonetics, etymologists seem to
prefer a link with the Middle Low German vlögel
(wing) and the Germanic vlōch & vlucht (used in the sense of both “wing”
& “flight”) or even vlunke (the modern
Low German Flunk (wing,
pinion)). The modern use in German of
fluke to describe the tail of whales and such is thought borrowed from
English. The use of sea creatures came
from the Old English flōc (flatfish),
of Germanic origin, related to the German flach
(flat), the Old Saxon flaka (sole),
the Old High German flah (smooth) and
the Old Norse floke (flatfish,
flounder, flak, floe; disk), all ultimately from Proto-Germanic flakaz, from the primitive Indo European
root plak- (to be flat). The parasitic worm was so named in the 1660s
by virtue of the distinctive (flat) shape.
Although the The Flookerang can best be described as a pair of stylized boomerangs, one with an especially acute angle overlaid atop another in a more conventional shape and it can be assumed Chrysler used flook in the sense of the appendages on weapons rather than the homophonic fluke’s sense of (1) a lucky or improbable occurrence unlikely to be repeated or (2) to by pure chance obtain a successful outcome (although, in retrospect, there was an element of both in the corporation’s 1957 ranges). The shape obviously was abstract and did not represent one of Chrysler’s manufacturing divisions (in 1957: Plymouth, Dodge, DeSoto, Chrysler & Imperial) or a specific model or range. It was instead a mid-century modernist allusion to the latest version of the company’s “Forward Look” design, introduced for the 1955 season and styled by Virgil Exner (1909–1973; vice president of styling, Chrysler Corporation 1957-1962). The 1955-1956 Chryslers were for the corporation a watershed because although the mechanical engineering had always been sound (in some ways, often industry-leading), by the late 1940s the styling of the cars had become “frumpy”, a product of the design ethos of Kaufman Thuma “K.T.” Keller (1885–1966; president of Chrysler Corporation 1935-1950 and chairman of the board 1950-1956) who believed a car should be able to be “driven by a gentleman with his fedora or Stetson on”. This resulted in cars that were tall & boxy; while comfortable to sit inside and drive, they looked old-fashioned and out of step with styling trends from Europe or elsewhere in Detroit. Basic engineering was the message (“function over fashion” in the modern parlance) and although there were critics of the approach (including many within Chrysler), Keller was unmoved, quoted as saying that while none of the corporation’s cars would: “…knock your eyes out, neither will they knock your hat off as you enter or exit”. He also had earthier ways of explaining his philosophy.
Flookerang variations: 1958 Plymouth Fury (left), 1961 Dodge Dart Phoenix (centre) and 1961 Plymouth Fury (right).
Trouble
was, in the unexpectedly prosperous US of the early 1950s, folk were becoming
more interested in style and less in their hats and when Exner’s “Ford Look” appeared
late in 1954, buyers responded to “longer,
lower, wider” as predictably they would for most of the next two
decades. The lines were elegant, the
dimensions well proportioned and, at least in the more expensive versions, there was nicely detailing and it was a direction the industry could have taken but the US
of the mid 1950s had become something of a candy-store and there were lots of
kids with pocket money; prosperity begat excess. Exner’s 1957 range more than any was the one
that ushered in mass-market fins and a half-decade of bloat in the American
automobile; in retrospect, it was “the curse of plenty”. Still, the macropterous era was among the
most memorable era in an industry that’s had a few and, if excess there must
be, it should be “laid on with a trowel”; that Exner’s re-styling for 1957 did
but within a couple of seasons, compared with the ways GM (General Motors)
outposts like Buick and Cadillac would explore the theme, the 1957 Chryslers
appeared (almost) restrained. By contrast
with the extravagance seen on the cars the emblem was created to promote, the Flookerang
was subtle, the overlaid shapes denoting (1) rapid forward progress and (2) the
sweep of those big fins rearward. As a
conceptual link it was one of the more successful of its kind but,
unfortunately, the species it referenced soon went extinct. Chrysler in 1957 had announced the look in banner
headlines reading “Suddenly, it’s 1960” and, in a period when the “futuristic”
was everywhere in films, newspapers and fiction, the cars did seem to offer a
glimpse of a bright, shiny new world.
The problem was however that once on the path of excess there is nowhere
to go but “more excessive” and that’s what happened; by the time it really was “1960”,
the moment had passed and the fins soon would be pruned, Exner fired (actually
relegated to a face-saving consultancy) the Flookerang in 1961 (mostly) abandoned,
replaced by the mysterious Fratzog.
Fratzog
(pronounced frat-zog)
A corporate
logo since 1961 used from time to time by Chrysler Corporation (and of late revived by Stellantis,
the multi-national automotive manufacturing concern into which Fiat-Chrysler
was in 2021 absorbed).
1960: According
to industry legend, a wholly meaningless word made up on the spur of the moment
by the shape’s designer. If the designer
(whose name remains unknown) had some inspiration for their choice, it seems
never to have been documented but frequently it’s been assumed the construct
was frat(ernity)+ zog. Fraternity was
from the Middle English fraternite, from
the Old French fraternité, from the Latin
frāternitās, ultimately from frāter (brother). Although almost certainly unrelated to
Fratzog, in the Albanian language, zog translates
literally as “bird” (zogu (“the bird”,
using the definite article)). The Zogolli
family’s (the construct being the root Zog + the Ottoman-Turkish patronymic
suffix –oglu (son of)) most famous member
was Zog I (Ahmed Muhtar Bey Zogolli; 1895–1961); King of Albania 1928–1939) and
in 1922 (after the Ottoman Empire was dissolved), he Albanized and shortened
his surname to Zogu, six year later clipping the final “-u” and adopting the
mononym King Zog as his royal title.
Fratzog also predates by some 16 years the acronym ZOG (used also as
Zog) (Zionist Occupation Government, Zionist Occupational Government, or
Zionist-Occupied Government), a term (dating from 1976) for the US government
used by certain antisemitic conspiracy theorists claiming Jews secretly control
the US government (a recurrent theme in Nazi propaganda under the Third Reich
(1933-1945) extended also to the UK government). JOG (Jewish Occupational Government) has also
been used but, historically, SOG was preferred it was thought to distinguish “Jewish
subversive conduct” from “being Jewish” although that subtlety escaped most. Fratzog is a noun; the noun plural is Fratzogs.
Using standard etymological deconstruction, a surface analysis of Flookerang reveals the portmanteau construction but all that’s known of the origin of Fratzog is the logo emerged in mid 1960 from Chrysler’s Highland Park styling studio, then under the direction of Elwood Engel (1917–1986; Chief Designer, Chrysler Corporation 1961-1973). Whether it was the work of an individual or something of a team effort is unclear but, given the simplicity of the task, that it came from the hand of a single designer is quite plausible. While never named, some sources have referred to the designer as “he” so it’s reasonable to assume it was a man (throughout Detroit the styling studios then an almost exclusively male domain although women had for decades being involved in color choices and interior detailing) but no documentary evidence has ever been sighted. The meaning of Fratzog has long been a mystery with the industry legend being it was “made up on the spot” after someone in the marketing department sent a request asking how they should refer to the thing. Having the punchy qualities of being short, memorable, phonetic, unique and needing only two syllables, it would have had some appeal to marketing types but whether they ever sent a “follow-up” asking what it meant, isn’t known. Probably it was good they didn’t pursue the matter because the orthodoxy is “Fratzog” has no meaning, speculation focused usually on the “frat” element with the most popular theory being it may be a borrowing of the clipping of “fraternity” (a social organization of male students at a college or university) and familiar in forms such as “frat party” (much associated with drunkenness, frat houses to this day one of the most convenient paths to alcohol for those under 21 (in the US the minimum age at which alcohol may be purchased and consumed)). Many of the designers at Highland Park would have been “frats” (members of a fraternity and habitués of frat houses) so it’s not impossible “fratzog” may have been slang among certain drunken students although that’s wholly speculative but there is a rich history of such constructs including “frat boy” & “frat rat” (members of a fraternity, the most obnoxious of the breed dubbed “fratholes”), “frat house” (a fraternity's building) and “frat flick” & “frat lit” (movies & books about fraternities or appealing to the frat boy stereotype (“fratire” the ultimate form of the literature, now understood as a stream of “toxic masculinity”)).
The Dodge Charger Bengal Edition was created in 1968 by Cincinnati Dodge dealer to celebrate the formation of an NFL franchise for the city, arranging with Chrysler’s fleet supply staff to have the cars painted in orange and fitted with black vinyl roofs to match the team’s colors. Amusingly, Chrysler had no such orange in the color charts for its passenger cars but a shade mixed for Michigan Department of Transportation's fleet proved a perfect match. An order of 50 was required for the specialized run so 50 duly were ordered in a variety of mechanical configurations. Reflecting Dodge’s usual build practice for 1968 Chargers, Fratzog logos were fitted on the grill and rear panel unless the R/T package also was ordered in which case R/T badges were substituted. In either case, a Fratzog appeared on the steering wheel boss but mysteriously, some 1968 Charger R/Ts exist with a small Fratzog on the instrument panel while others have a miniature R/T. “Special editions” like the Bengal Charger often appeared to stimulate sales of slow-selling models but the 1968 Charger was a hit from day one and although the product planners had projected sales that season of around 20,000, they were pleasantly surprised when more than 96,000 left the showroom, a second assembly line quickly added to meet demand. It was a remarkable increase on its slab-sided predecessor (1966-1967) that in 1967 had struggled to achieve a volume of less than 15,000.
King Zog I of Albania died in 1961 but there’s nothing to suggest Fratzog’s second element was inspired by or a tribute to the deposed monarch, by then living in France (the culmination of a peripatetic exile made comfortable by having looted the Albanian treasury of its gold reserves) where he would succumb to cancer, his 65 years a reasonable achievement for someone who reputedly smoked some 200 cigarettes a day (if true, assuming he slept 8 hours a day, that’s a fag about every 5 minutes which does seem heroic). It’s intriguing to ponder whether being dubbed a “fratzog” was something good or bad but, whatever might be the history of the name (that might to some sound like something associated with the rituals in a Masonic Temple), the shape is no mystery to mathematicians, the Fratzog based on a Deltoid curve (the roulette created by a point on the circumference of a circle as it rolls without slipping along the inside of a circle with three or one-and-a-half times its radius). Its year of debut came of course at the at the dawn of the space race but while the shape (three delta-forms arranged in an equilateral triangle) might be thought (at least vaguely) evocative of an aerospace theme, that would not have encouraged more pessimistic types who saw only a “fractured deltoid”. So, no translation, acronym or verified linguistic origin exists but despite that it certainly caught on, first appearing on the 1962 Dodge Polara 500 and Custom 880, before being applied to various Dodge and other Chrysler models until 1976 and in some places lingering until 1981 when, at the instigation of the new CEO, Lee Iacocca (1924–2019), the pentastar logo was standardized corporation-wide.
Nor is it
known if the Fratzog’s “triangular” theme was an allusion to the company’s
original logo. The Dodge brothers (Horace
(1868–1920) & John (1864–1920) engineering business had begun production of
passenger cars just before World War I (1914-1918) and their first emblem had
been a dual interlocking triangle that resembled a stylized Star of David. The family was not Jewish and it’s believed
the logo used representations of the Greek letter delta (in upper case use a
triangle shape) meant to represent the two brothers who had always been close
(John dying of pneumonia during the 1918-1921 influenza pandemic and Horace
expiring the same year from cirrhosis of the liver). Other logos would appear after Chrysler purchased
Dodge in 1928 (following an abortive earlier attempt) but none were even vaguely
Fratzogish so history is not much help in tracing the origin; the industry
legend of a designer just “liking the shape” may really be true. It did though have a longer and more diverse
career than the Flookerang, serving variously as body badges & grill
emblems and appearing also on gas (petrol) caps & horn buttons. Despite the proliferation, the Fratzog never
became thematic in print advertising the way the Flookerang had been used in
the 1950s.
Except among collectors or students of such things, by 2024, neither logo probably much registered in the public consciousness in the way of Chevrolet’s bow-tie or Ford’s “Blue Oval” (that font a hand-drawn rendition based on Henry Ford’s (1863-1947) signature although Truetype emulations are now available (FordScript the closest, Fabiola Script & Neville Regular similar)) but despite the collective memory having faded, in 2024 Dodge announced the Fratzog would be revived as symbol of its new range of electric power-trains, assuring the world the constant advances in battery chemistry meant the days of thousand HP (horsepower) EVs with AWD (all-wheel-drive) and a 500 mile (800 km) range were nigh; burning rubber wasn’t going away, it’d just no longer require gas. To make the historic link, there was CGI (computer generated graphics, generative AI (artificial intelligence) at that point not sufficiently refined) footage with Fratzogs, a rationale and lots of tyre smoke. As things turned out, batteries continued to improved but Dodge’s announcement 2023 would be the end of the line for their gas-powered V8 muscle cars turned out to be premature though genuinely that was the intent, keen-eyed observers of promotional material for the 2024 (EV) Charger Daytona noting Fratzog logos on the wheel hubs with the one in the centre of the grill being illuminated.
EV: The future of Fratzog. Dodge's EV shtick is that “people buy performance, not a mechanical specification”, a variant of the hardware store's “people don't want 20 mm drill bits, they want 20 mm holes); it'll be interesting to see if the “US muscle car model” (front-mounted V8, RWD (rear-wheel-drive)) can be re-defined to “performance breakdown”. The market will decide.
There was also a neologism, “Frazonic” emblazoned on the rear valance; it turned out that adjective referred to the “Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust” (piped “engine noise”, replicating in tone and dB (decibels) the song of a Hellcat V-8; the adverb presumably “Fratzonically”). Just as government regulations had by the early 1970s contributed to the demise of the first muscle car era (although the insurance companies did their bit), so it seemed clear that five decades on, government edicts might also drive extinct at least the V8-powered monsters of the new generation, production of such things no longer viable given the new fleet fuel efficiency mandate. However, as things turned out, there may be a stay of execution, internal documents “obtained” by various sites appearing to confirm Dodge’s EV ranges may in 2028 be augmented by a Charger running the supercharged 6.2-liter (376 cubic inch) Hemi Hellcat V8 in a RWD (rear-wheel-drive) configuration. The internal designation appeared as “HEV” though that stood for not the by now common “Hybrid EV” but the wholly more subversive “Hellcat Equipped Vehicle”; that repurposing may not have been mischievous but someone at Dodge may have been trying to annoy Greta Thunberg (b 2003). So Dodge is gearing up for what may be one last hard ride for those who can remember the way things used to be done (when noise was organic and not Fratsonic) but within the Stellantis product planning department, the only poem much read is likely to be To a mouse (1785) by Robert "Rabbie" Burns (1759–1796) with focus on the two famous lines: “The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men / Gang aft agley” (ie however well-planned, things can go awry). Corporate America has found Donald Trump’s (b 1946; POTUS 2017-2021 and since 2025) second administration more accommodating than its immediate predecessor but, like many, keenly they’ll be watching the returns from the 2026 mid-term elections.
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