They appeared in Breaking Bad. Robert Redford burned them down in Spy Games. William Shatner took a puff on one of them in an episode of the original Twilight Zone, and you can find them in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and while you're hanging out with your chooms in Cyberpunk 2077. There are no more infamous fake product brands in the history of media than Morley Cigarettes.
Back in the early days of the 20th century, smoking was cool. The public didn't know that cigarettes would kill you. It was almost impossible to find a place in life where there wasn't a pack of cigarettes hanging around. In movies and on TV, actors, news anchors, and late-night hosts all smoked, like some evil force was going to take cigarettes away from them, forever. The first product placement in a movie happened all the way back in 1896. By the time Out of the Past, starring Robert Mitchum, rolled out in 1947, characters on screen were smoking almost constantly. If smoking in damn near every scene wasn't enough to capture the popularity of burning nicotine sticks, the film even had an actor named Philip Morris in it.
However, back then, the majority of shows and movies that had packs of smokes in them were sponsored by tobacco companies. Strangely, using them during filming, without the nod from Camel, Marlboro, and the like, could be considered copyright infringement (you'd think that they'd be happy with the free publicity, but nah). To get around a potential lawsuit, Hollywood prop houses started creating fake cigarette brands that could be used in movie and TV productions. Morley cigarettes were designed by the Earl Hay Press Prop House in the 1960s. Being one of the oldest and largest prop houses in Hollywood at the time, it had its fingers in a ton of television productions and multiple flicks. Morleys made their first appearance in Psycho and went on to appear tons of times in network television shows like Mission: Impossible and The Twilight Zone. But they caught on in a HUGE way, just before the turn of the century, after the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement was passed. The TMSA forced American Tobacco companies to agree to pay out $250 million during the first 25 years that the agreement was in place. That's a lot of money, but not as much as the companies were projected to lose from private lawsuits for marketing smokes as safe and cool and fraud over the same period.
These days, real smokes can be used on screen (thank your local lobbyist) so long as they're not advertised. But studios still rely on Morleys because the threat of private lawsuits could empty their coffers.
