Make Friends With FAST: The Volkswagen Fast Totem

“Make friends with your Fast” is the theme of VW’s new advertising for its GTI model, the sport version of the Golf, by former Mini ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky.

The evil gremlin creature in the TV ads looks like this:

Each new GTI buyer, the company tells us, receives a plastic “Fast” about 10 inches high with four interchangeable tails. The critter in the ads, however, seems to be considerably larger than the plastic mascot. The face replicates the red trim “smile” on the car’s grille, a motif borrowed from the original.

The “Fast” models have shown up on eBay—but so soon after the campaign was introduced that one has to suspect the ad agency is involved.

The campaign is for the latest fifth generation of the VW GTI, the sporty coupe that first arrived in the United States in 1983 as a variant of the Rabbit. Now it is a variant of the Golf—except the Golf will now be called the Rabbit again, when it arrives this summer. Confused enough?

The older GTIs have their fans.

A memorable ad showed the early GTI bouncing along accompanied by a version of Little GTO with German lyrics and GTI substituted.

The new ads build on such memories. There’s a fairly silly ’70s-nostalgia thing going in this whole campaign, along with cliché German accents. The TV spots include a German engineer character played by Peter Stormar, the Swedish born actor one film critic wrote “usually plays Europeans of varied nationality and often of dubious morality," whose previous credits include Satan, a wife beater in the film Chocolat and one of the murderers who feeds a body through a woodchipper in Fargo. He was also the doctor who did eye transplants on Tom Cruise in Minority Report.

Among the slogans of the print campaign is “It’s der Scheisse” which sounds better than the translation, “It’s the shit,” a phrase Chevy never used.

The Fast looks awfully familiar, perhaps because it draws on so many earlier characters. Its graphic pedigree includes: the original 1970s VW Rabbit logo, preserved in later GTI badging, plus:

Vinyl figures:

plus, Spitfire skate wheels:

Plus, Taz—Tasmanian devil from Looney Toons:

With echoes of Ugly Dolls:

Which of course are basically updated versions of the old Nauga dolls:

Also the Rat Fink, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s creature.

The ads and other info are online at VW Features.