Smoke Ring
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Surrealism and Fraud in Tobacco Advertising
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The Best of Everything
(Bonus Holiday Video)
This live ad from November 1949 reveals some helpful table-setting ideas for Thanksgiving — and the secret to a welcoming holiday table.
Chesterfield Parodies, 1949-61
By the time it began sponsoring radio broadcasts of The Chesterfield Supper Club in 1944, Chesterfield had long been a leader in the use of music in advertising. Its jingle for the show, Smoke Dreams, fairly painted the pre-television air with smoke. This project was initially sparked by a search for a decent recording of that jingle. When none better than the poor quality recording below turned up, I transcribed and recorded a new composite arrangement of the product theme based on different listener airchecks, then edited together several different
20-second television "stingers" using footage from 1958 and 1961 campaigns.
20-second television "stingers" using footage from 1958 and 1961 campaigns.
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Smoke Dreams -- Original Radio Jingle (1944)
:15R 1944 |
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Smoke Dreams
:20TV 1958B ("Legal") |
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Smoke Dreams
:20TV 1961B ("Daddy") |
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Expert Professionals
(60 seconds) |
Expert Professionals comes from a live, "host-selling" ad, with music inspired by the period and absurdities behind tobacco marketing.
Created from a kinescope ca. 1950. Sound quality reveals defects in the original source. |
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Snow Job is a heavily edited composite of five Chesterfield spots filmed in the early 1950s. The primary motif comes from a spot intended for episodes of Dragnet. The show's star Jack Webb, in his "Joe Friday" character, references a "report" (suggesting a police report but actually referring to a bogus "medical study") read in a separate spot featuring George Fenneman. The music follows conventions of "film noir" and classic 1950s television shows like Dragnet and Perry Mason.
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Snow Job
(90 seconds) The footage was vague about what constituted "accessory organs".
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Journalism
(60 seconds) Created from a kinescope ca. 1951. Sound quality reveals defects in the original source.
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Journalism finds "one of our Chesterfield Tobaccoland reporters" asking the same inane questions of tobacco farmers all over North Carolina without ever trusting their responses. The voiceover was read by a then-obscure radio actor, Raymond Burr. This musical treatment is inspired by the style of Publio Delgado (a/k/a/ The Harmonizator) and Henry Hey videos, in which instruments track or shadow the "melody" (and suggest implied harmonies) in human speech.
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With A Record Like This also uses musical "speech shadowing".
All but the last few seconds of this clip come from a single "host-selling" ad. Filmed clips were inserted into the original live performance of the ad, in which a smoking baritone bureaucrat quotes from an FTC ruling invalidating a claim used in an ad by a competitor, conflating an advertising restriction with a medical finding. Whether the ruling was in Chesterfield's favor, or merely against its competitor, is unknown and apparently irrelevant, for the "controversy" provides the fog for propaganda to take over, and the live host reassures the audience their cigarettes are safe and healthy. Kinescope footage ca. 1952. |
With A Record Like This
(60 seconds) |
Early television production techniques were meager — often just a few shots with no music. This also applied to commercials, which included celebrity endorsements, "host-selling", overhyped claims, shady sources, emotional manipulation, and Fourth Wall-breaching cross-references between the product and the show. Sponsors even asserted creative control over show scripts in the 1950s. All these tactics were especially common in tobacco advertising, which dominated American radio and television until being banned at the end of 1970.
In 1998, as a condition of the legal settlement with 46 states, tobacco companies released all proprietary documents from their marketing operations (including the ads themselves) to the public domain. This document dump exposed longterm patterns of deliberate, systematic deception, fraud, and other sordid corporate behaviors.
In other words, a perfect recipe for musical satire.
In 1998, as a condition of the legal settlement with 46 states, tobacco companies released all proprietary documents from their marketing operations (including the ads themselves) to the public domain. This document dump exposed longterm patterns of deliberate, systematic deception, fraud, and other sordid corporate behaviors.
In other words, a perfect recipe for musical satire.
Created entirely from public domain footage. The music is original.
No cigarettes were harmed during the making of these videos.
No cigarettes were harmed during the making of these videos.
Copyright ©2022 by Gates Thomas. All rights reserved.