Flintstones hawking cigarettes

Now *this* is some good ad creative! Ah, those were the days. (Thanks, Gabe Adiv!)

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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loonquawl

http://bedazzled.blogs.com/bedazzled/2007/09/1970s-flintston.html
orwellian

Do you have the one where Mickey Mouse sells cherry-flavored lead paint? “Now with extra chipping, boys and girls!”

Then again, The Flintstones was a rip-off of The Honeymooners where the main character threatened to beat his wife (to the moon, Alice).
- Nadreck
  
  A rip-off of the “Honeymooners”! Are you suggesting that Big Content is based on copying old ideas? That would be like saying that Disney ripped-off old Fairy Tales and stuff for their success. The very idea!
_OM_

…Old news. Didn’t BB post about this a couple of years ago?
- David Pescovitz
  
  I thought it had been on BB before but I couldn’t find it in Ye Olde Archives…
ian71

I remember an episode of The Flintstones where Wilma and Betty were working as Cigarette Girls. I vividly recall Wilma’s voice saying, “Cigars… Cigarettes? Cigars… Cigarettes?”
- Anonymous
  
  that was betty boop.
nixiebunny

When I was a wee lad in the late sixties, the kickboards at the local university swimming pool had Winston ads on them. This is nowhere near that bad, conceptually.
Anonymous

Wilma and Betty are smoking hot. How did Fred and Barney ever hang on to these women?

I hate to see them work so hard. Let’s go around back where we can’t see them. That’s comedy.
- Spikeles
  
  @4 Anon: Well.. i’d go with Betty.. but i’d be thinking of Wilma.
  
  As for the ad.. it made me feel like throwing up.
Laurel L. Russwurm

In those days, everybody smoked.

Of course, as an adult I was seriously shocked to discover the characters on Thunderbirds smoking. You have to realize is that folks on Thunderbirds were wooden puppets! Talk about a health hazard!

The world was a very different place back then.

Gee, wonder why so many started smoking.
- querent
  
  My grandmother tried to tell me they “had no idea they were bad for you.” As an on/off smoker, that’s a friggin laugh. I can sure tell the difference.
Anonymous

Yup, here’s the old one from the archives. (goog-fu flintstones cigarettes site:boingboing.net)
http://boingboing.net/2003/03/21/cigarette_ads_from_o.html

Still, I think it deserved a repost – it’s doubly interesting the second time around, as we move further from the era where this was acceptable. In the interim period, the creator of Ren and Stimpy, John Kricfalusi, has called for a return to this mode of funding cartoons via endorsements, and indicated he’d like to see Ren & Stimpy run on the same model.
Anonymous

I remember seeing this back when I was a first-grader. I used to ask my adult friends if they remembered it and they all insisted I was imagining things. Then the Internet came along and I was able to dredge it up and show them directly.
Anonymous

Let’s not forget also that when the flinstones first came out (and nearly any cartoon in that era for that matter) it was geared more towards adults than children.
rebdav

I am not a kid, but when everyone else is smoking I might burn half a cigarette. Damn peer pressure. I find there are two kinds of cigarettes, the kind that make you gag and want to cough leaving a raw bronchial tract and throat, and those which are smokable. The big American brand cigs usualy are the second smokable category. I have never found the taste argument valid but then again more than one or two smokes a week and I can feel it as I commute 30km/day by bike in serious hills. I wonder why they don’t just say brand X is highest in nicotine, calms the nerves, wont choke you, wakes you up and loosens your bowels a bit…
oddbrian

Geez, David, this story is older than, Hell, the Flintstones themselves.
Sup dawg

the flintstones started out as an adult cartoon trying to be like the hoonymooners bedrock version so marketing cigarettes wasnt so crazy for this cartoon the flintstones are like an OG adult swim
voidmstr

I smoked Winstons all through college and adulthood until I switched to Rothmans.

I wonder if Barney influenced me in my youth!
fxq

Flintstones Hawking Cigarettes – The cigarettes that tell aliens to ignore you because you are merely cavemen. (sorry couldn’t resist)
Stefan Jones

I’m old enough to remember the last season or so during their initial run.

I don’t remember the cigarette commercials, but I do remember Wilma and Pebbles pitching Welch’s grape juice, and wondering why mom wouldn’t buy us any.
MadRat

There was also a 10 minute cartoon of Fred and Barney hiding out at the bar from Mr. Slate and calming him down by selling him (and the audience) beer. I can’t remember which brand of beer.
Anonymous

There’s a web site that examines the interplay between the Flintstones and cigarrette advertising:

http://cooley.colgate.edu/Flintstone/
sam1148

It’s a little known fact the Flintstones society came after the Jetsons. They are a Modern Stone Age.

After the Sprocket/Cog corporate wars, the earth was left in ruins; most human knowledge was lost. Books, Movies, Music were all DRM protected and unusable to the remaining ground dwellers.

The ground based survivors recreated a society using using hard copy media salvaged from the Holocaust.

They imitated 50′s and 60′s America as their touchstone and used escaped bioengeered animals to mimick the appliaces and tools of those decades.
viberce

These commercials drove grammar nazis back then crazy. The slogan should have been “Winston tastes good AS a cigarette should” to be gramatically correct.
Blue387

I remember watching this three years ago.
- dculberson
  
  Could you be more specific?
  
  My time is yours.
- David Pescovitz
  
  Why didn’t you tell me about it?
lava

sure, that was before we discovered that cigarettes caused cancerock.