Want to see what old “smoke 'em if you got 'em” days were like?
Careful, mateys! Thar’s .rams in them thar links!
I think it was sometime in the 70’s when they stopped advertising Cigarettes on TV – Welcome to my childhood folks – and I’m sure that of many of us older dopers. We had commercials telling us how “Healthy” a smoke was. How it improved our lives to smoke. This was in the days before they simply began implying your life was better and every TV star from The Rifleman to Lucille Ball to, yes, Fred and Barney (remember, it was a prime time cartoon aimed at adults) were enlisted to hock (and later hack) cigarettes.
The tobacco companies bankrolled many an early television show.
So what is it two or three generations that are unaware of this practice.
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BTW: I might have been suckered into all of the cigarette hype, if I hadn’t lived in a house where people smoked and recognized it for the filthy habit it actually is.
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Hell, contestants on certain game shows walked away with a case of cigarettes!
Ah, the cigarette themes I still have running through my noggin . . . “What—do—you—want? Good grammar or good taste?” “You’ve come a long way, baby, to get where you got to today!” “Have-a-Lark Have-a-Lark Have-a-Lark today!” “Winston tastes good like a (snap, snap) cigarette should!” “You get a lot you like with a—Marlboro!”
Let’s not forget LSMFT… Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco. Game Show Network (on cable) used to show game shows from the fifties on Sunday evenings–I’m not sure that they still do this, but nearly all were sponsored by cigarette companies, and yes, contestants would sometimes win -cases- of cigarettes :EEK:!
LSMFT
Lucky Strike Means Flavor, Too!
4 out of 5 doctors who smoke, smoke Kools!
Well, no. Not that they were healthy, but that so-and-so brand was mild on the throat. “Not harmful” was the idea. But they dropped that pretense around 1964, when the Surgeon General’s report on smoking and health came out. Cigarette commercials themselves went off U.S. television in January 1971.
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I seem to recall seeing one once on some archival show with a doctor going into surgery claiming that smoking helps calm him down and gives him the steady nerve to perform the fine work of surgery.
:eek:
Yeah, 1971. I was seven, and I remember singing along with the Winstons commercials (my folks smoked Winstons).
I still remember Mom giving me fifty cents and sending me to the corner to pick her up a pack of smokes when I was five or six; I was permitted to spend the change on candy.) Wonder what a convenience store clerk would do nowadays if a six-year-old walked in, unattended, slapped some money on the counter and asked for a pack of Winstons?
No, they never claimed smoking was healthy, but they sure’s hell implied it. I still remember ads that seemed like they said “OUR brand is soothing to the throat!”
They haven’t had any Black & White Sunday Night in at least a couple of years. They still have B&W shows like “Beat the Clock” and “What’s My Line”, on between four & 5 in the morning.
One of ‘em had a tag that said “I’d rather fight than switch” and would always show an actor with a big ol’ shiner.
Which one was it that played up the length of their cigarette by always having the far end of it bent as if they’d run into some item with it?
I think that was Benson & Hedges 101s, “A Silly Millimeter Longer.”
Benson & Hedges had the series of ads in which the end of their long cigarette would always get bent or smashed by a telephone receiver, elevator doors, etc. (A millimeter longer, one-oh-one . . .")
Remember the suggestive cigarette jingle that declared, “It’s not how long you make it, it’s how you make it long”? 
“Us Tarryton smokers would rather fight than switch!”
George Carlin used to have a whole routine about how cigarette slogans were the filthiest, most sexually suggestive ones around.
He only mentioned a few. But they all seem to be that way.
“This is the one they’ll have to beat.”
“A silly millimeter longer.”
“Alive with Pleasure”
“It’s what’s up front that counts.”
“Taste me, taste me, c’mon and taste me.”
“Wherever particular people congregate.”
“Blow some my way.”
I have quite a few OTR shows on tape.
You haven’t lived until you’ve heard someone claim that smoking is “good for digestion”.
(BTW, Jeff, “I’ve Got a Secret” gave away a carton of Winston to all contestants during the era, around 1953-1960, that they sponsored the program.)
Would that someone be Cecil Adams? 
Mr. Moto: Don’t forget “I’d walk a mile for a Camel”
For the record, it was Chesterfield that came out with the 101mm cigarette (the “silly millimeter longer” jingle was sung to the tune of “La Bamba”).
Benson and Hedges was the first brand to come out with the 100mm cigarette, and the first wave of ads featured bent cigarettes. Later, they showed creative ways of dealing with the “problem”; one memorable commercial showed a man sitting behind the wheel of his car, ciggy dangling from his lips, while he kibitzed a couple of guys installing a new windshield, with a strategically placed bubble to accommodate the monster.