These Could Be The Most Fun Headrests In All Of Automobilia: Cold Start

I like when carmakers come up with special editions of their mainstream cars because the rules that dictate what makes sense or is a good idea or any of the usual rules just don’t seem to apply, or at least aren’t applied as rigorously. That’s why we get things like those “jeans”-themed cars crammed full of denim from Volkswagen and AMC, or that Smart car with the funny bird wings or even a Citroën special edition based on a disposable pen. They’re weird. That’s why, given the context, the Peugeot 106 Cartoon really isn’t all that strange, even if it objectively is.

The Peugeot 106 Cartoon was a special edition not based on a specific cartoon character or group of cartoon characters, like, say, the Chevy Venture Warner Bros edition or maybe those Mitsubishi Hello Kitty cars, but rather just the general idea of cartoons, in a sort of abstracted, generalized way.

From the outside, the 106 Cartoon doesn’t look like anything that remarkable, just a regular small city car in the expected European FWD hatchback mode, but with some small stickers on the door signaling to you that the owner of this car appreciates the idea of animation and comical drawings:

That logo is kind of odd because visually the way the letters are drawn they almost feel more like architectural or technical drawings, except for that pair of eyes. Like, those arrows around the C and T, indicating motion, that feels like something from a sketch of a mechanism, doesn’t it? This all feels like they described the idea of cartoons to someone who perhaps had never actually encountered one.

Now, inside, the 106 Cartoon is more fun and bonkers, mostly because of the seat and door card upholstery, which looks like this:

That upholstery references a lot of comic or cartoon tropes, with panels and Ben-Day dots and a certain bonkers tone, though the colors don’t feel very “cartoon” and the whole thing again feels like the result of faxing an alien a quick description of what cartoons are.

But the headrests! The headrests just about make up for it all, because they may be the most whimsical and fun headrests that have ever grown in a car, because they’re car headrests that are car headrests, as they’ve been meme’d:

They are like little plush car-dolls. Intrestingly, I’m not sure they really resemble a Peugeot 106 all that much; they feel more like a Citroën  C3 (or maybe a Pluriel) to me? Even if that didn’t really exist exactly when this came out, of course.

By far the most cartoony thing about the Peugeot 106 Cartoon was this commercial, which Peugot hired the famous Tex Avery to do, and featuring Tex Avery’s trademark characters, a hot lady named Red (sometimes Miss Vavoom in more recent times) and a painfully horny wolf who loses all composure and even eyeball retention upon seeing her:

Holy crap, wolf, have a wank or something. Though here, his affections seem to be focused on the car, which contains, oddly, that depressed-sounding hound dog from those other cartoons.

Still, incredible headrests.