[Richard Kimball]

Essentially the ‘64 Mustang was a re-skinning of the Ford Falcon model, so essentially the “new model” was just a shell.

The Falcon was a neat car. I would have liked to have had a convertible. Ford had a weird thing going on for a while, where they'd come out with a great car concept, then over the years, destroy the concept. They turned the Thunderbird from the premiere two seater American sports car into a bloated family car, and the Mustang from being a cool pony car into a one lunged econobox.

They seem to have learned from that mistake, as the new Mustang is a return to the original roots.

[Tallguy]

That’s exactly right. To a certain extent all the US manufactures ruined their pony cars. They became overweight, nose-heavy muscle cars in very short order. But with the full-size family cars getting big-block V-8’s shoe-horned into them, the marketing pull was headed to high-performance.