It was 1962 when Ducati produced the first Scrambler, specially designed to respond to the needs of the American market. An unquestionably original bike, it was publicized using colour images that were distinctly unconventional for the time. The Scrambler arrived in Italy a few years later, in 1968, and was an immediate success.
It was then that Ducati came up with the idea of using some of its own employees in the advertising campaign. The outcome was an iconic shot showing the now-famous "Franco and Elvira" astride this classic Ducati bike. At the time he was working at Ducati as a test rider and she - easily as beautiful as any professional model - was working in administration.
These two icons, then, just had to be the leading characters in a 3-episode web series made using stop-motion animation. The videos - the plasticine protagonists of which were hand-made by three talented nineteen-year-olds from Bologna - tell an imaginative story of how the Scrambler Ducati ended up in the present day.
The plot runs as follows; Franco, a man from 2078, is catapulted by a time machine back to the Woodstock festival of August 1969 where he meets and falls in love with both Scrambler Ducati and Elvira. They joyously elope on the bike, yet before the two can even kiss the time machine hurls them forwards to the present day, to 2014. Franco and Elvira find themselves directly in front of the fabulous "yellow container" - first visited by Ducati employees and then the enthusiasts who flocked to WDW 2014 - from which they exit astride the new Scrambler Ducati.
The third and last video of the series, just released on vimeo.com and the Scrambler Ducati Facebook page, brings the web series to a close and innovatively reveals the lines of this latest Bologna-built bike.
