Madman Muntz
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Earl "Madman" Muntz (1917 – 1987) was a legendary merchandiser of used cars and consumer electronics in the 1940s and 50s, mostly in California. He later founded the Muntz Car Company which made the Muntz Jet, a sports car with jet-like contours. The car was manufactured in 1952 and 1953, with less than 1000 cars being made.
Muntz was born in Elgin, Illinois.
Although Muntz pretended to be a madman, he was actually a shrewd businessman and built up a large fortune selling everything from autos to radios. He had a sharp eye for taking the cost out of the products he marketed so relentlessly, and his practice of reducing any device to the minimum number of components needed to function became known as "muntzing".
"Muntzing" had it's points. In the early 1950's, many brands of television set had upwards of 30 tubes on the chassis. By trial and error, Muntz developed a television chassis that gave a perfectly acceptable black and white picture with a 17 tube chassis. The sets, marketed under the name "Muntz", sold very well for a while, and unlike the sets with much more elaborate chassis, they did not "cook" themselves to death in a short time.
Engineers still tell stories about him. He was known to carry wire clippers in his pocket, for instance, and if he saw that one of his engineers had put a component he considered superfluous into any of his products, he would just snip it out. In his attempts to combine two of his main product lines, cars and stereos, he invented the Muntz Stereo-Pak 4-track tape cartridge, a direct predecessor of the 8-track cartridge developed by Bill Lear. The 8-track cartridge became the standard for pre-recorded mobile audio for two decades.
Muntz also founded a spinoff company which manufactured pre-recorded 4-track tape cartridges. Most record labels did not manufacture 4-track tape cartridges themselves, as the format was less popular than 8-track tapes. In fact, it was practically dead by 1970, while 8-track tapes continued to be widely issued until 1982. However, the Muntz Pak Corporation licensed music from all the major record labels and issued hundreds of different 4-track tapes in the 1960s, from approximately 1965 – 1970.
His flamboyant television commercials for his various businesses made him famous; in one he promised to destroy a car on television if it was not sold the same day of his commercial. Muntz was the originator of the immortal "I'm insane, so come take advantage of my crazy prices" sales gambit, later employed by New York area electronics chain Crazy Eddie, amongst others.
External links
- [Muntzing], from the website of National Semiconductor
- [The Man: Earl Muntz], a biography from the website of a biopic about him
- [Madman Muntz], an AOL user's fansite
- [Earl Muntz, the 4-Track Madman], from a website maintained by four fans of 8-track tapes, online since 1995
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