1967 Camaro Pace Car commercial

In 1967, Chevrolet borrowed a primetime sitcom witch to help sell a brand-new Camaro that, ironically, was mostly bought with a base inline-six and a three-speed. The commercial folds Bewitched’s magic into GM’s era-defining options culture, where practically everything on the car was a paid extra. It’s a strange, charming piece of Detroit advertising history.

In 1967, if you wanted to sell a brand-new Camaro to America, the fastest route apparently ran straight through a witch’s nose twitch. Chevrolet didn’t just buy ad space around Bewitched — it built an entire commercial opening around the show’s signature magic, folding Samantha Stephens into a pitch for a car that, in reality, was mostly sold with a base inline-six and a three-speed manual. What’s left is a strange, charming artifact: part sitcom crossover, part sales pitch, and a genuine window into exactly how General Motors convinced a generation it needed a Camaro in the driveway.

Chevrolet’s Secret Weapon: A Sitcom Witch

The Bewitched connection wasn’t a coincidence or a one-off licensing deal — Chevrolet sponsored the show for five straight seasons, from 1964 through 1969, according to viewers who caught the tie-in. Building a car commercial around a hit sitcom’s opening sequence gave Chevy something money alone couldn’t buy: an audience that was already primed, relaxed, and entertained before the sales pitch even started. It’s a marketing approach that feels almost quaint by today’s standards, but for a mid-1960s TV audience with far fewer channels and far more shared cultural touchpoints, tying a new car to a beloved character was about as effective as advertising got.

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The Six-Cylinder Camaro Nobody Remembers

Ask most people today to picture a 1967 Camaro and they’ll describe a rumbling V8 with a hood scoop. The reality, according to commenters who actually owned these cars new, looked different. “I drove a 250 c.i. three-speed manual transmission Chevy,” one viewer recalled. “It had its charms, like the rock-solid-but-uninspiring engine that never quit, but today’s drivers would not want that car, believe me, no matter how cool it looks.” The base Camaro was a six-cylinder, three-on-the-tree commuter car for plenty of original buyers — the V8 legend came later, built retroactively by decades of enthusiasts gravitating toward the performance-optioned survivors that stuck around.

GM’s Options List Was the Real Star

One of the sharpest observations in the comments has nothing to do with the Bewitched tie-in at all — it’s about how GM actually built and sold cars in this era. “Everything was an option in those days at GM,” one commenter explained, “so Chevy including a few optional items at no extra cost was a big deal. The nice thing about options in the past was you could actually customize your car to your personal taste and budget. Cars were actually pulled off the assembly line to have the options installed.” That level of build-to-order flexibility, largely gone from mass-market car manufacturing today, is part of what made period Camaro ordering sheets so genuinely personal.

Heavier Than Any Car at Its Price — A Selling Point?

Buried in the commercial’s narration is a claim that reads almost backwards to modern ears: the Camaro is pitched as heavier than any competitor at its price point, framed as a virtue rather than a drawback. More than one viewer caught the line and questioned it directly — “Did he just say heavier than any car at its price? Like that’s a good thing?” In 1967, though, mass and solidity were still commonly marketed as proxies for quality and safety, long before lightweighting became a performance and efficiency priority. It’s a small line, but it says a lot about how differently automakers talked to buyers sixty years ago.

The Six-Cylinder Loyalists

Not every commenter piled on the base six-cylinder engine. Several defended it specifically for the trait that mattered most to a daily driver: it simply didn’t break. “My friend Bill Carsley had a ’67 coupe with the 230 and a three-speed, which he had for over ten years. Great reliability,” one viewer wrote, while another suggested the ideal spec would pair the 250-cubic-inch six with an overdrive transmission and taller gearing for better highway economy. It’s a reminder that not every classic Camaro story is about horsepower — plenty of these cars earned their keep through a decade or more of unglamorous, dependable commuting.

How Close the Camaro and Mustang Really Were

“Wow, never realized how Mustang-like the Camaro was in 1967,” one commenter admitted, and it’s a fair observation given the Camaro’s origin story. GM built the first-generation Camaro specifically to answer Ford’s Mustang, launched two and a half years earlier and already dominating the emerging pony car segment. The proportions, the long-hood-short-deck stance, and even the base-engine-plus-options sales strategy all echo the playbook Ford had already proven worked. Watching a period commercial like this one makes that competitive lineage obvious in a way that staring at photos of both cars side by side sometimes doesn’t.

A Time Capsule Worth Preserving

Commercials like this one rarely survive in good condition, and the fact that this one exists at all — hosted with a note pointing viewers to MuscleCarFilms.com for more period material — reflects a small but dedicated community of collectors working to preserve advertising history that would otherwise simply disappear. One frustrated commenter noted the clip’s aspect ratio couldn’t be corrected during playback, a small but telling reminder of how much work goes into rescuing footage like this from obsolete formats.

What a Two-Minute Ad Still Teaches Us

Sixty years later, it’s not really a car ad anymore. It’s a documentary fragment of how an entire industry once talked to its customers — through sitcom tie-ins, options-list customization, and sales pitches that treated extra pounds as a selling point instead of a compromise. None of that survives in modern car marketing, which is exactly why a two-minute clip built to sell six-cylinder Camaros in 1967 still finds an audience of enthusiasts nearly six decades later.

It’s worth remembering, too, that this commercial was never meant to survive this long. Broadcast ads from the 1960s were largely treated as disposable, aired for a season and then discarded once the campaign moved on, which makes every surviving frame of this Bewitched-Camaro crossover a small act of accidental preservation rather than a deliberate archive. That’s part of why enthusiasts hunting for period-correct advertising material treat clips like this one as genuinely rare finds, not just nostalgic curiosities.

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