The Flintstones Say "Smoke Em If Ya Got Em Kids"

Written By: Ken Hulsey

Cartoon characters smoking? WTF!

It is hard to fathom that a cigarette company would use cartoon characters to sell it's product to children, but that is exactly what Winston Cigarettes did back in the early 1960's.

During the original run of The Flinstones the show was sponsored by several different companies, one of them Winston Cigarettes. To showcase the sponsor's products Hanna-Barbera (the animation company that produced The Flintstones) produced several add spots featuring their beloved characters using the products ..... even smoking cigarettes.

Today such a advertising campaign would be strictly taboo .... but back in 1961 nobody thought twice about it and the adds aired on prime-time television for the whole family, including youngsters, to see. It is pretty damn obvious that these adds, though made for adults (The Flintstones, though animated, was considered adult viewing), were really designed to get kids to take up smoking.

Screw you Joe Camel .... we got Fred and Barney!

I actually think that there was an add with The Great Gazoo reading a Playboy and drinking Coors beer ..... but I may be mistaken.

All jokes aside these adds did air at the end of every episode of The Flintstones back in the day.

Here are an example of some of these commercials:



There are just soooo many things that are not PC about this one! "Hey Barney let's sit on our fat prehistoric butts while the women folk do all the hard work .....". Forget the fact that they are smoking for a minute and think about how much of an uproar there would be today for Betty and Wilma being portrayed as female servants to their male husbands alone.

You've come a long way baby!



This is the kinda stuff that you will never see on Boomerang!





Okay, the last one is a Jelly add .... which would be okay .... except for the fact that it promotes obesity in children. Which is now a big no-no! In fact Fred and Barney are a bit on the heavy side so maybe the whole show should be banned?

Sounds crazy right?

You never know? Things are getting kinda weird around Washington.

Just saying ....

See Also: Travel Back In Time With Clips From Saturday Morning Cartoons / The Man Called Flintstone (1966)