Chris Hansen’s blog

I have only gotten one Church Times out of the four I have now missed, I haven’t gotten any of the Economists I’ve missed, and I got two of the same New Scientist from this week: why the same two, I don’t know.

But one of the odder things I got was two DVDs from here. You may remember this post, where I waxed nostalgic about summer Sunday afternoon Red Sox games on TV, with their White Owl, Atlantic gasoline, and Narragansett Beer advertisements. Well, the two videos I embedded are no longer available for free, but tvdays.com does sell DVDs of various kinds of commercials. So I bought their two DVDs of cigarette commercials from the 50’s and the 60’s (not that there were many made after the 1960’s), and I got them a few days ago.

Nostalgia does not have to always be aimed at things you remember fondly and would like to have back. The days when no one minded cigarette, cigar, or pipe smoke are well and truly over, and I would hesitate to smoke anything, not that I ever took it up after it killed my mother. But watching some of these old commercials takes me back to those more innocent times when

• The original Flintstones cartoon was not only sponsored by Winston cigarettes, the characters lit up and enjoyed them;
• Benson and Hedges commercials showing people in silly situations because their cigarettes were too long were funny and won advertising prizes (if you’re my age or older, you can probably still hum the backing tune to this ad);
• Women were encouraged to smoke cigarettes like Lucky Strike, which were (and are) unfiltered and possibly the most dangerous things you can smoke;
• Old Gold cigarette packages with shapely women’s legs danced their way across stages into our hearts (and lungs);
• Smoking a White Owl Invincible cigar would gather a roomful of beautiful women around you;
• Kent’s jingle (“To a Frenchman, it’s the Eiffel Tower….to a Scotsman, it’s the reg-e-ment, to a smoker, it’s a Kent!”) could become an earworm after not hearing it for almost 40 years.

Nostalgia is the Bitch Goddess from a Non-Smoker’s Hades.

Apologies to two groups:

• Non-North-Americans, and
• Those who are under 45 years of age.

The members of the first group will not remember any of these commercials unless they spent a lot of time in a country that still permitted cigarette advertising on TV and had the same brands as the US. The members of the second group will possibly wonder why anyone ever allowed tobacco advertising on TV.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 08:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.