The 1987 romcom Take Me Out to the Snowland is said to have created a skiing boom in Japan, but the hit movie didn’t just hype up snow sports. The star car, a Toyota Celica GT-Four, became a popular sight at the slopes. Now, to celebrate a concert tie-in with the film, Toyota has created a tribute video with the GR Yaris.
We’ve discussed Take Me Out to the Snowland (directly translated from Japanese as Take Me Skiing) back in 2020, and how the Toyota-sponsored movie spurred sales of Celica GT-Fours among powder hounds. Prior to the ST165 there hadn’t really been sporty, fashionable cars available to young winter sports enthusiasts. Four-wheel-drives like Land Cruisers and Pajeros were seen as capable but not necessarily cool. The Celica changed all that.
The plot revolves around a pair of employees navigating a romantic relationship while launching a new line of ski equipment across ski resorts in central Japan. In the movie’s most memorable scene, some characters must rush from one location to another, but find the roads blocked by traffic. So obviously they take their Celica GT-Four onto the slopes. The car flips at the end of the scene, and Toyota was reportedly furious at the producers for showing the car they donated losing control.
On the other hand, the movie did find Toyota a new demographic of Celica customers so perhaps all was good in the end. Now almost four decades have passed and Take Me Out to the Snowland is considered a pop culture classic. Toyota seems content to let bygones be bygones and sponsor a ski-themed tribute concert with the GR Yaris, which the company claims is the spiritual successor to the Celica GT-Four.
Singer Yumi Matsutoya, known as Yuming among fans, has been linked with skiing ever since her hit album Surf & Snow debuted in 1980. She’s held a concert at Naeba Ski Resort every year since, making this year the show’s 45th anniversary. Matsutoya was approached by Snowland filmmakers to provide the soundtrack to Snowland, resulting in the theme song “Surf Heaven, Ski Heaven“, now modified in the Toyota video as “Surf Heaven, Ski Heaven, Drive Heaven”.
The 80s vibes in the video are fantastic, from the puffy jumpsuits in eye-melting colors to the foam-headphone walkman to the whole-ass Swatch wall clock. The tapes strewn about the car’s dash are pretty funny, because as far as we know the GR Yaris doesn’t come with a cassette player option. We’re definitely missing some of the references, which seem to be a smorgasbord of 80s callbacks, like the skier in the deep-sea diver’s suit. Fortunately, the GR Yaris doesn’t land shiny side down.
The white Celica wasn’t the only Toyota in the movie. The protagonist drives a red EL31 Toyota Corolla II Retra GP Turbo, an EP71 Toyota Starlet is driven by a minor character, and another semi-important character drives a red ST165. It’s hard to overstate how widespread Snowland‘s influence was. Soon after the movie debuted, a trend developed in which Celica GT-Four owners would stick ski resort decals on their cars, advertising destinations like Naeba or Appi. In 2017 for the 30th anniversary of the movie, a company began selling Sallot merch, named after the movie’s fictional ski equipment company. A couple of years ago a replica of the white Snowland Celica was featured at the Nos2Days car show and put on the cover of Hachimaru Hero magazine.
Funnily enough, in Matsutoya’s decades-spanning musical career she only had one official tie-in with Toyota (not counting the song Matsutoya wrote for Kumiko Yamashita that appeared in a Tercel/Corsa ad). Matsutoya’s song “Central Freeway” appeared in the ReBorn campaign, which saw Beat Takeshi and Takyua Kimura playing samurai legends Hideyoshi Toyotomi and Nobunaga Oda driving around in a second-generation Crown.
Yumi Matsutoya’s most well-known automotive connections are with Mitsubishi. Throughout her career she lent many of her songs to commercials for the Minica Toppo BJ, multiple generations of the Mirage, their recreational vehicle line, and Mitsubishi Electric’s Diatone car stereos. And as it happens, Take Me Out to the Snowland‘s producers originally approached Mitsubishi for product placement but they turned it down, ceding the resulting popularity to Toyota.
with the GR Yaris, which the company claims is the spiritual successor to the Celica GT-Four.
That maybe so, but the Yaris looks nowhere nearly as good as the 88 Celica .