How Many Ideas Can You Mash into One Drawing?

Aurora-ception: Princess Aurora’s Aurora in Aurora with Aurora seeing the Aurora

Translation: Princess Aurora from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty standing in front of her Oldsmobile Aurora in Aurora, Illinois with the Russian cruiser Aurora looking at the Aurora (northern lights).

        Once, I decided to draw an Oldsmobile Aurora. I love the understated gentlemanly 1990s sport sedan style that it has with a hidden grille and an American V8. Then, I got bored and I stopped, only having drawn the rear end, rear windshield, and rear wheels. After a few months, I uncovered my family's old RCA VCR player. We always had old tapes of our family taken from my dad's camcorder as well as some old movies on tapes. I immediately went to look up the manual on the Internet and plug it into our giant flat screen TV. One of the first tapes I watched was one of my sister's which had Disney's Sleeping Beauty on it. I was reminded of my Oldsmobile Aurora drawing from Princess Aurora, and I got this crazy idea to finish the drawing and incorporate all these Aurora-named things in it. I always liked the name.

        The name Aurora comes from the Roman goddess of dawn. The beautiful name has had much influence, from inspiring many American city names, to various cruisers from the British Royal Navy, to one particular example of the Russian Empire that fought in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) and is a museum in St. Petersburg. Want to know more about the Auroras pictured? Read on.

Oldsmobile Aurora

        The Oldsmobile Aurora made its debut for the 1995 model year. Oldsmobile pioneered lots of technology in the automotive industry, but by the end of the 1900s, sales had slumped. Rising competition from Japanese automakers like Infiniti, Lexus, and Acura also hindered Oldsmobile’s success. To revitalize interest in the brand, Oldsmobile wanted to design a new halo car in the 1990s. Aurora was the flagship of the Oldsmobile model range and was built from the ground up, separate from other Oldsmobile models. Aurora shared a platform with the final generation Buick Riviera, but they shared none of the same engines or design cues.

        Oldsmobile sought to differentiate Aurora from the other models. Aurora was given her own logo, which depicted the launching of a rocket. There were no Oldsmobile logos anywhere on the car, except for the radio-CD-cassette deck and engine cover. She wasn’t to be referred to as Oldsmobile Aurora, she was to be referred to as Aurora, by Oldsmobile, like a beautiful art form on wheels. The styling looked nothing like other Oldsmobile models and featured a very period-correct bubbly aerodynamic shape. The front lights were horizontal and slim, and the grille was very cleverly hidden on the lower part of the bumper, giving the car a very subtle gentlemanly aggressive look. The taillights were integrated into a light bar. 

        Oldsmobile made sure that the new platform for Aurora was strong. The Aurora exceeded expectations in its roof crush test. Aurora was so sturdy that she broke GM’s test machine. Aurora could withstand 8000 pounds of force which exceeded the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards by a wide margin.

        Aurora used a modified Cadillac Northstar V8 engine. The 4.0 liter engine produced an impressive 250 hp and 260 lb-ft of torque. Aurora was one of the only cars in its class of full-size luxury sedans to come standard with a V8, along with the Japanese competitors. While the Lexus LS and Infiniti Q45 made more power, Aurora was a bigger car and less expensive than the Japanese cars, so you got more car for the money that was still comparable from a performance perspective. A brochure of the 1994 Aurora stated that the engine had 556 less moving parts than the Lexus V8 and the engine broke the 25,000 km world speed-endurance record previously held by Mercedes.

        Aurora was an exceptionally well-designed car for a GM product. She had an extremely sturdy frame, robust powertrain, and the performance of a large sport sedan to back it up. Unfortunately, the second generation Aurora in 2004 became more mainstream and lost a lot of the appeal of the first generation. GM put a V6 engine in the lower trim levels and the styling became more similar to other GM products. Aurora was too little too late to save the dying Oldsmobile brand.

        More information about the Oldsmobile Aurora can be found in this article by Kurt Ernst, a managing editor at Hemmings.

        The Aurora brochure referenced above can be found here. More Oldsmobile brochures including more about Aurora can be found here.

Aurora, Illinois

        Aurora, Illinois is a city about 40 miles west of Chicago. It is the second largest city in Illinois. Before European settlers, there was a Native American village in what is now downtown Aurora on the banks of the Fox River. Joseph McCarty, a pioneer from New York State, sought a new home out west. He built the first campfire in April 1834 on the island that became downtown. He invited his brother Samuel thinking it was a great spot for a community. The settlement was called McCarty mills because the brothers built a grist mill and sawmill. In 1837, a post office was established, and the settlement became Aurora, named after the Roman goddess of dawn. Later, the city became the first in the United States to use electric lights for publicly lighting the entire city, earning the nickname "City of Lights." I found this very interesting, because Paris, France is also referred to as the "City of Light," due to it being one of the first European cities to adopt street lighting in the mid-1600s, and it helped to lower the crime rate and increase security. Aurora became a manufacturing city until its decline in the 1970s and 1980s. The Hollywood Casino built in 1993 was one of many projects that helped revitalize the downtown along with the existing Paramount Theater, that are included in my drawing. From there, the population soared as suburban development occurred around the area.

        Information was taken from Aurora's official website here and the archived version here.

Russian Cruiser Aurora

        The Russian cruiser Aurora was one of three Pallada-class cruisers of the Russian Empire built between 1897-1900 and commissioned in 1903. Aurora took part in the famous Battle of Tsushima of the Russo-Japanese War. During the October Revolution in 1917, it was reported that Aurora fired a blank shot to signal the storming of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. Aurora is now moored in St. Petersburg as a museum.

        Information was taken from an English website of St. Petersburg by a company based in the city here. You can watch a video about the history of cruiser Aurora here.

The Auroras

        The northern lights are an atmospheric phenomenon caused by solar flares that strike the Earth's atmosphere. Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei coined the term "aurora borealis" in 1619 after the Roman goddess of dawn. There are many ancient depictions of auroras, but the science wasn't theorized until the turn of the 20th century when Norwegian scientist Kristian Brikeland proposed that electrons emitted from sunspots produced the atmospheric lights after being guided toward the poles by Earth's magnetic field. This was proved correct, but well after his death in 1917.

        Information was taken from Space.com here.

Princess Aurora

        Princess Aurora is the third member of the Disney Princess lineup and the last to be developed during Walt Disney's lifetime. She made her appearance in Sleeping Beauty (1959), based on the fairytale of the same name. Aurora is the daughter of King Stefan and Queen Leah. Aurora's parents named her after the Roman goddess of the dawn because she filled their lives with the radiant sunshine.  On the day of her christening, she was cursed to die by the evil fairy Maleficent. Due to the efforts of three good fairies, the curse was altered to instead draw Aurora into a deep sleep that could only be broken by true love's kiss. Two of Aurora's fairies kept fighting over coloring her dress with magic, one wanted blue and the other wanted pink. Aurora's figure was influenced by Audrey Hepburn. Unfortunately, the initial critical and commercial failure of Sleeping Beauty discouraged Disney from making movies out of fairytales, and the next princess didn't exist until The Little Mermaid in 1989... 30 whole years later!

        Information was taken from the Disney Wiki and Wikipedia page of Princess Aurora.