Actually, no. In most cases it isn’t acting. You never see a celebrity as “Housewife #2”. They aren’t even “playing” themselves. They are personally endorsing a product, which is a different thing.
As, I meant to add, was pointed out by Asteroide.
To whom I would mention that I believe the Royal Family really does use the products to which their warrents are attatched. I really don’t think they get paid for those
But forty years ago, TV actors did commercials during their shows.
This, I think, sums it up nicely.
By the way, I love the way Michelangelo sold out for that ceiling painting job.
No, actually it used to be much more common than it is nowadays. Companies sponsered shows and got their name in the title. The cast members hawked the goods right in the middle of the show. Milton Berle, Burns and Allen, Jack Benny, Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason, even the Flintstones - they all did TV ads which aired during their shows.
This is why not only do you see Ricky and Lucy smoke, but you specifically see them smoke Philip Morris (you can see the labels). Sometimes you’ll actually see a little aside of Ricky giving Fred a pack of smokes from a carton or of Ethel asking to bum a smoke in the middle of a scene that has no relation to smoking- it was strictly for product placement. The Beverly Hillbillies originally ran commercials during the show in which the cast members (in character) pitched corn flakes, coffee, cigarettes (Jed actually says “Weeeell doggie!” after taking a puff- Miss Hathaway and Granny both smoked like chimneys in real life so it probably didn’t bother them, but Buddy Ebsen was a militant reformed smoker [however he was a professional and endorsement was in his contract]) and dish detergent among other products. So did The Addams Family and The Munsters; they’re actually hysterical when you see them now. (Imagine today if Bree & Edie of Desperate Housewives did a 30 second spot in character hawking Dove in a little 30 second spot or Carrie and Carter discussing the relaxing buzz from a Kool in an ER spot.)
Supposedly network executives wanted Gene Roddenberry to incorporate cigarettes into Star Trek as tobacco companies offered to sponsor the expensive show, but Roddenberry absolutely refused as he didn’t believe smoking would be around in the 24th century (though miniskirts of course will most likely be). Queen Victoria became furious in the 1890s when her middle aged oldest son Albert Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), in need of money as usual and with a mother who refused to increase his allowance, appeared in a print advertisement for a London piano company.
I could be wrong, but my impression was that television, until fairly recently, was something of an entertainment ghetto. An actor who went to work for television was thought to have already abandoned “serious” theater. TV actors weren’t thought of as artists or permitted to worry much about artisitc integrity. As was pointed out, endorsements were part of the gig and were written into the contract, as well as the script.
Um, no, it absolutely was not. During a one-hour show back then, there may have been three breaks for commercials; most of the commercial breaks lasted fewer than two minutes.
Today, a one-hour show typically has four commercial breaks. Each break runs about seven minutes long, advertising up to 10 different products.
Yes, it’s called advertising.
I have watched every episode of I Love Lucy, and can’t recall a single time when Lucille Ball (or any other of the stars you mentioned, with the exception of the Flintstones) promoted a product during her show - unless you think Vitameatavegimin is a real product - nor do I recall her ever playing a role in a commercial that appeared during the airing of her show.
Can you give me some verifiable evidence that she did?
And, were you born after 1978?
Russell Crowe’s an ass.
the commercials, eh, they don’t annoy me any more than the ones with people I don’t recognize, unless it’s just an celebrity I hate or an obnoxious premise. my impression of the celebrity may or may not change based on the type of commercial-- if it’s a witty commercial, I’m like, hehe, they’re cool. it’s like doing a very short comedy sketch. but if it’s just “blah! buy blah! so you can be blah!”, I feel some small measure of pity for them, because it’s such a silly position to be in no matter who you are, and then when you’re already well-known, it’s like… man, you cheesy bastard. I saw you being cheesy, and now I’ll remember it every time I see your cheesy ass.
that said, Japanese commercials with American celebrities are so fantastically ridiculous as to totally negate the extreme cheese of it all and simply make me laugh my ass off. any American celebrity who does a Japanese commercial automatically gains 5 ninja cool points. by law.
I don’t think Nemo is saying that the ads were necessarily incorporated into the storyline of the episode. But Lucy and Desi did do ads for Phillip Morris cigarettes that ran during their show. For an example, see this page (scroll down about half way to where it says “I Love Lucy Sponsor Phillip Morris”.)
As Sampiro pointed out, there are numerous Phillip Morris product placements in the actual show. You would be surprised how often the PM logo shows up in the show.
And it’s funny that you should mention the Vitameatavegimin episode. If you recall, early in the episode, Lucy is trying to convince Ricky that she could do a good job as a product spokesperson. She removes the innards of their TV and crawls inside to do a “commercial” for Ricky. The set up of the “commercial” is clearly a take off of Phillip Morris advertising.
Well, Marge, if you don’t believe me, perhaps you’ll believe Sampiro’s or Kepi’s posts. Or, if your prefer, you can
watch it for yourself. This site also has the Flintstones ad I referred to.
The only celebrity advertisement that has ever bothered me is the recent one that Darius Rucker (of Hootie and the Blowfish) is doing for Burger King. He’s dressed up in a little red cowboy outfit…very campy, almost vaudevillian.
I can imaging young black males all over the country shaking their heads in disgust.
That Lucille Ball ad for Phillip Morris was despicable. The Flintstones ad is even more offensive because its audience is children.
However, to return to the point, I doubt the ads ran very often, and there were so many episodes of Lucy and the Flintstones. Lucy would have done it in support of her show (her performance in the ad is so clearly canned) but she would NOT have signed a one-year contract to do commercials during someone else’s show just to make a buck, as did Catherine-Zeta Jones, Robert DeNiro, Halle Berry, the Simpsons, Cindy Crawford, Steven Tyler, and many, many others. Yes, Lucy did print ads, too, but not to the extent that the aforementioned stars have.
Celebrity ads were not “much more common back then” than they are now. Yes, there was product placement back then, but not to the degree of placement today, where one movie can have up to 30 product placement “ads.” It’s big business.
My original point, though, was that there was a stigma attached to doing those kinds of ads 20 years ago as opposed to now, where it is a common occurrence that no one thinks twice about. For example, Steven Tyler NEVER would have considered doing a milk commercial back in 1980. It would have hurt his image and his career. Now, it’s considered fashionable.
<slight hijack> It was my understanding that adults were the target audience for the first run of The Fintstones. It is a cartoon, stoneage version of the Honeymooners.
Check out these General Foods advertisements from the late 1960s/early 1970s. (I was born in 1966 and can vaguely remember some of these ads.)
Scroll down for the Carol Channing ads- there’s something incredibly dreamlike about hungry Nazis, Jell-O and Carol Channing all on the same screen.
Marge, we’ve presented an awful lot of examples of how widespread celebrity ads were back in the 50’s and 60’s. And you seem to be saying, “that’s not the way I remember it.” Could you perhaps offer some evidence of your own to support this?