Lucy and Ricky love smoking, and you should too!

By at 12:50 am Saturday, Feb 5


Here's Lucy and Ricky promoting Philip Morris cigs to "smart young Americans" as being free from next-day "cigarette hangovers." The thing about old adverts is that they come out of a context that is, on the one hand, so competitive and on the other hand, so regulated, that even a 60-year-old ad looks like it came from another planet, not just another century. Between the aggressively obvious airbrushing and makeup, the unabashed targeting of cigarettes to young people, and the casual use of the term "cigarette hangover" (I've never heard this before, though I experienced it when I was a smoker), this is as science-fictional as the most extreme moments in Blade Runner or The Fifth Element. Indeed, as others have pointed out, the advertising in those futuristic movies is even more anachronistic than this stuff, since it's just a straight linear extrapolation of today's ads, predicting a world where things are only "more" but not "different."

Contest Entry--Philip Morris, 1952

 

Read more    

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Feb 22, London, University of Westminster Centre for Law, Society and Popular Culture
* Mar 9, Washington DC, IAPP Global Privacy Summit
* Mar 22, London, The Economist Technology Frontiers

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)

Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.