Back in the sixties, the Flintstones were making headway for the cartoons industry by cracking TV Networks hereby bringing the once pre-movie cartoon to the small screen with great results but in those days, rules were also different and this time we cover a particularly infamous advert where the Flintstones were advertising Cigarettes.
No that's not a photoshop, that image is real and so to is the advert.
To anyone interested in animation history, back then it was so expensive to produce cartoons that the only place they could do it was on the big screen before a major film, which explains why the quality of the likes of the Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry were so high for it's time period; to do a cartoon for Primetime TV was unheard of and needed more than most budgets would allow hence they needed a sponsor in the form of Cigarette brand Winston, so at the end of every episode during it's original run would include a commercial for Winston Cigarettes; it's not restricted to Cigarettes either as they would later move on to Busch Beer.
So how can a cartoon get away with advertising such adult products?
Well Flintstones was never marketed to kids, it was meant for the sitcom crowd, it was a take on the Honeymooners to begin with so it shouldn't come as a surprise, in fact cartoons were never originally marketed for kids, ironically it was Hanna Barbara who realized that kids were enjoying cartoons a lot more than adults and started marketing them to kids more than adults. In fact it would be many decades before it would market to older audiences again, with the likes of Space Ghost Coast-to-Coast and Harvey Birdman Attorney of Law.
And a nice welcome back to the Urban Legends feature, there will be another shortly.
