Oh you know it’s that time again. Time to take a trip back to memory lane. When some of our readers think Nostalgic Wednesdays, they’re thinkin’ something from way back in the 90’s. We’re gonna take you there and to the 60’s with this week’s edition covering the infamous MoonEyes 1960 Toyota Crown! (Be sure to click on the Magazine pix so you can read it!)
Back in 1996, mom shorts were the rage
When I first came across the Mooneyes Toyota Crown on the RIVERSIDE blog, I was very much intrigued to see such a car on the cover of the January 1996 issue of CUSTOM RODDER. Let’s be real here, when you see Custom Rodder’s typical cover cars, 99.99% of them are domestic cars (obviously), and the last kind of cars you’d expect to see are Japanese cars. So what’s the big deal anyways?
Mooneyes has been around for quite some time and is mainly associated with custom street rods such as old school Chevy’s and Buicks. They’re widely known in the Domestic street rod culture as GReddy and HKS is known in our import culture. But what some people don’t know is that Mooneyes actually has a very strong Japanese following, so much so, that they even have a dedicated Japanese alternate website. So what was a good way to show off this culmination? A customized Toyota Crown of course!
So back sometime in the early to mid 90’s, Mooneyes USA set out to find a Toyota Crown to modify. But this was definitely not as easy as rolling through a CarMax and picking out a corolla. A rare 1960 Toyota Crown sedan was found, an extremely rare import model that was originally sold as a left hand drive 4 door in Northern California. This rare gem was then sent directly to Mooneyes’ USA Headquarters in Santa Fe Springs, CA for it’s restoration and newfound makeover.
And make it over they did. The Toyota was fitted with a GM ZZ3 350 5.7 liter small block V8 engine, Mustang II front suspension, and a 9″ Ford rear end. The car was then lowered on custom Boyd rims and sprayed that famous Mooneyes yellow shade. The Crown, weighing next to nothing but now churning out some serious horsepower, left a lot of domestic hot rods in it’s dust. But after the dust settled, nobody knew what had just beaten them because Mooneyes had shaved off any emblems or markings with the words Toyota Motor Co.
Pretty cool car right?
The folks at Custom Rodder thought so too, and for the 1996 front cover, they had the import front and center. Of course, most of the article was about having an import in their pages as opposed to actually talking about the car itself, but that didn’t seem to stop the hate mail from being turned into Custom Rodder’s mailboxes. This sparked a controversy about how Custom street rods should only be domestic cars and how a Japanese car could never be classified as such.
Kinda makes you wonder if things would be the same if such a car were to be featured in today’s time.
For more info, hit up these sites!
Mooneyes USA
Moonyees Japan
Japanese Nostalgic Car
RIVERSIDE
Mooneyes Facebook Page
SpeedHunters/Mike Garret’s tour of Mooneyes USA
Custom Rodder
–David–
David@maydaygarage.com