Wenesday Advertising Day.
One of the best and longest running ad series was the one Lou Fine did for Philip Morris. They featured the Philip Morris bellhop, a midget actor who was used in ads on all of the radio shows the cigarette company sponsored. You younger readers may not realize it, but almost all of American popular culture would not exist (or at least not in the same way) if it wasn't for the sponosoring and talent picking done by cigarette companies. In radio, tv and comic strip ads, they were a force to reckon with. In fact, up until the early sixties sponsorship of programs was always by one company, which in effect had all the creative control. Without the cigaret ads, there would have been no Jack Benny, no Steve Allen, no Lucille Ball and no Sergeant Bilko.
The Philip Morris ads by Lou Fine were numebred. I have tried to put a huge amount of them in some sort of ordr. Because sometimes the numers are missing or obscured by the poor black and whte micro-fiche copies I have to use, that I tried using dates as the guiding principle. But even then, problems have occured. I see this as an ungoing project, in the end I hope to have all 116 ads in full color. For now I have about half of them, half of which are in color. I probably could make a complete run in black and white, but I don't want thos to overwhelm my selfmade color scans.
Anyway, I am adding seven new ones to my previous post. Follow the label and scroll down to see the two posts covering this. This time, I am using numbers to fill the holes.
#62
#66
#79
#85
#94
#104
#105
1 comment:
Just awesome. Wish they would collect some of his strips at some point.
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