If you’re into mid-century retro-futurism, here’s a special treat: Fisher Body’s 1958-59 print ad campaign, which featured some some truly spaced-out illustrations.

Fisher Body doesn’t really exist anymore. The body manufacturing company was dissolved and absorbed by General Motors in 1984. But for decades (starting in 1925) it was a separate and powerful division at GM that even included its own marketing and advertising operations. Easily the most distinctive Fisher Body campaign was the series of print ads that ran in major national news magazines, Life especially, in 1958-59.

In these ads, vehicles from all five GM car divisions—Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac—were shown only as bodies, separated from their chassis and drivetrains and set in far-fetched scenarios. In the ad above, a ’59 Chevy Impala Sport Sedan is traveling through outer space with the taillamps apparently serving as rocket exhausts. The topline is “The extra dimension in Body by Fisher is time,” declaring that Fisher bodies are “built for keeps.”

While some of the Fisher ads showed GM car bodies hurtling through time and space, others depicted them as hovercraft-style machines skimming along the ground like Luke Skywalker’s X-34 Landspeeder. In the illustration above, which appeared in an ad in the March 1958 issue of Life magazine, a 1958 Oldsmobile 98 Holiday Coupe is shown cruising past the Sphinx and the Great Pyramids of Giza in Egypt.

This unbridled corporate weirdness did not fail to catch the attention of Mad magazine, the great parody publication of the period. The magazine’s editors, who liked to call themselves “the usual gang of idiots,” came up with their own satirical version of the Fisher Body ad, below. Here, on the back cover of the October 1959 issue, a ’59 Cadillac body with “Body by Fishey” is shown overrunning its own chassis and running gear. (The artwork was by Kelly Freas, a noted sci-fi artist as well a Mad illustrator.) We don’t know what the ’58-’59 ad campaign did to advance Fisher Body’s corporate image, but it was a whimsical approach we wouldn’t mind seeing from the auto industry today.