Here in North America, we got to know the 1985-1990 KE Ford Laser as the Mercury Tracer, and its successor was a near-identical twin to the Ford Escort for the bulk of the 1990s. Underneath, all these cars were Mazda Familias, which appeared here as the 323 and Protegé. In the Laser’s homeland of Australia, the car’s muddled ancestry didn’t prevent Ford’s marketing wizards from creating this television advertisement showing how unscrupulous corner-cutters used cardboard cutouts to disguise their non-Lasers as the real deal, even resorting to buying Laser badges from trench-coated ne’er-do-wells on street corners.

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