Saturday Smoking Lounge: Come To Marlboro Country

Anyone who was old enough to sit in front of the boob tube in the 60s certainly remembers the Marlboro Man TV commercials.

With the stirring Western theme (it was the musical score for the classically great movie, The Magnificent 7) and the Marlboro Man with his chiseled masculine features, they were as much a part of the 60s TV landscape as Andy Griffith or the Beverly Hillbillies.

More than anything, the Marlboro Man ads were responsible for propelling Marlboro from an also-ran brand in the 50s to the #1 worldwide best seller.

"Boros" as we called them, were this writer's constant companion through the first two years of undergraduate education (we could even smoke in lecture halls and in discussion rooms), before they were replaced by Camel straights, with their higher quality Turkish tobaccos.

Take a trip down memory lane with this 1963 black and white video of the softer-themed version of the Marlboro Man TV commercial:

(you have to adjust the video down to 240p to get this to run)

Saturday Smoking Lounge: Beatles Endorse Marlboro

The famous Marlboro Man

Marlboro is almost certainly the most popular cigarette brand in the world today and it is a little known fact that John Lennon and George Harrison cut an ad for the brand during their Beatlemania heyday.

The ad, shown below, had an obviously low-production value and was an impromptu effort filmed aboard a tour flight.

But at the height of their popularity, anything touched by the Beatles would sell so Philip Morris apparently lived with the reality that the Beatles wouldn't stoop to sit down in a studio and shoot a serious ad.

The Beatles were smokin' in the mid-60s

Ironically, George Harrison blamed his death on his heavy smoking of earlier years and in 2003, U.S. politically correct poster makers, airbrushed the famous cigarette out of Paul McCartney's hand in the Abbey Road poster. This brought down the ire of Apple Inc. which owns the rights to the photo.

John was a heavy smoker to his dying day -- a death that was in no way affected by tobacco use.

Here is the peculiar Beatles Marlboro ad: