Star Trek II's Khan, Ricardo Montalban, Had An Iconic Commercial Quote You Likely Forgot
Perhaps the crowning achievement of actor Ricardo Montalbán's Hollywood career, at least among pop culture obsessives, is the role of Khan Noonien Singh in the Star Trek film franchise highlight "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan." What some fans of Montalbán's iconic Star Trek character might not know is that the actor was responsible for another artifact of decades-old popular culture that resonated with audiences for altogether different reasons.
Through the 1970s and 1980s, car manufacturer Chrysler ran a TV ad campaign with Montalbán as its spokesperson. These ads present various Chrysler models, like the New Yorker and the Cordoba, as luxury products, outfitting Montalbán in formalwear and taking place in idyllic locations. While the featured cars, outfits, and settings differ, in each ad, Montalbán highlights so-called Corinthian leather, with which Chrysler outfits its cars' interiors. Montalbán's distinct vocal intonation of the phrase "Corinthian leather" gives these commercials an atmosphere more akin to a whisky or cigar ad than a routine car commercial.
While plenty of moviegoers today might not have seen any of these commercials on TV, their reverberations throughout pop culture are significant. "SCTV," "Superman: The Animated Series," "Deadpool," "Archer," "Puss in Boots," and the music video for the Sum 41 single "Still Waiting" all incorporate the phrase "Corinthian leather" — typically preceded by "rich," which was included in some of these ads — in tribute to Montalbán's work.
There's no such thing as Corinthian leather
While leather manufactured in the city of Corinth in Greece could, technically, be considered Corinthian leather, the interiors of Chrysler vehicles in the '70s and '80s incorporated nothing of the sort. Rather, PR agency Bozell came up with the phrase based on its marketability alone. Bozell is responsible for several other iconic ad slogans, including "the other white meat" in reference to pork and Sega's notorious rebuke of Nintendo, "Genesis does what Nintendon't."
During a 1987 "Late Night with David Letterman" interview, Ricardo Montalbán himself owned up to the fact that there's no such thing as Corinthian leather. "They found a leather that was very pliable, very soft, and very durable. And so ... Corinthian," he told Letterman, eliciting laughs from an audience aware of its meaninglessness.
It's perhaps a credit to Montalbán, then, that he could deliver nonsense so convincingly. Even consumers aware that Corinthian leather was nothing more than a sales tactic still held on to the phrase and reintroduced it in new contexts as a shorthand for haughtiness decades after the fact.