Tobacco Luau

Check out this Newport cigarette ad from the 60s:

http://www.archive.org/movies/details-db.php?collection=prelinger&collectionid=newport_5

Starts off with guy who looks amazingly like me, watching TV, when a Newport ad set at an Hawaiian luau comes on ... the grinning dancers beckon ... guy climbs in TV and in a fantasy that is amazingly like mine, is feted as the guest of honor at said luau, drinking drinks, checking out babes, and smoking a Newport.

Ads in the 60s really did try harder.

That's very cool! It's interesting that it's a 60 second commercial, but the story could have easily been told in 30 seconds. Today there are very few 60's anymore, it seems we are getting used to faster edits and can handle more information in less amount of time.

And, of course, today that commercial would be highly illegal. Even for booze.

tikifish --

would you believe that in the very early 60s some commercials were THREE MINUTES? I spoke with an ad exec who said he watched one of these recently and it looked like a full-on documentary to his 2004 eyes.

in fact, if you search "Ford" on the Prelinger Archives (go back to above link) there's a three-minute 1960 Ford commercial ... complete with a gaggle of men in tuxedos and women in evening gowns leaving their country club to examine the new Ford cars ... if you go for that sort of thing ... ; )

[ Edited by: Satan's Sin on 2004-07-17 13:08 ]

On 2004-07-17 13:08, Satan's Sin wrote:
would you believe that in the very early 60s some commercials were THREE MINUTES?

I'll take that any day over a one-hour infomercial.
This same website also has the old black and white film of a guitar player and a hula dancer that was posted here a while back.

http://www.archive.org/movies/details-db.php?collection=prelinger&collectionid=soundie_5

Unga --

I have watched this clip often and it is downloaded into my never-erase folder and I am totally in love with it. Who is the guy singing? What is the name of the song?

Girl's not such a hot hula dancer, but the song is just outta sight.

Recently had ShipWreckJoey and his wife over for drinks and I forced Mrs. ShipWreck to watch it and she said the guy playing the slide guitar was no good.

I like this video too.
I would say Mrs. Shipwrecked is right after listening closely too it. Bong could chew him up and spit him out.
I know we have some experienced hula dancers here in TC. Are either one of these hula dancers in the videos, actually doing any “authentic" dancing and not just Curly hand jesters?

Maybe the actual perfomances aren't so hot when you pick it apart, but sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts - I really like this video, and the song.

Do a search on this site for "Soundie", and you'll be rewarded with about 30 'music videos' from the 1930s-1940s. Some of them suck, but there are a handful that are really amazing.

If you download the full-sized MPEG-2 versions, the quality is suitable for burning to DVD, but you'll need special software to play it. For Mac OSX, I found a shareware app called VLC that will play the files from my har drive or from a DVD-R.

le sigh

those were great...
(though no, I don't think that was very 'authentic' hula, her footwork was too all over the place, granted I'm not an expert from taking one class at the community center :wink:
either way, lovely to watch though..

that site is neat..
this one is just WEIRD.. yet strangely compelling..
http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=opensource_audio&collectionid=dhawaii1923

Very bizarre bit of music ... wow ...

On 2004-07-17 13:02, tikifish wrote:
That's very cool! It's interesting that it's a 60 second commercial, but the story could have easily been told in 30 seconds. Today there are very few 60's anymore, it seems we are getting used to faster edits and can handle more information in less amount of time.

And, of course, today that commercial would be highly illegal. Even for booze.

Tikifish seems to be in advertising like me. And I wondered about her statment. So I gave it a try to trim down that old commercial to 30 sec. version like we would find it today. And to no surprise it was quite easy. Check it out at http://www.armchair-travelling.com/newport30.mpg

Mogambo --

That is really something. I am (now) intimately familiar with this commercial, and your edited 30 sec version seems absolutely no different than the 60 sec. original. Amazing. Just amazing! This could be used in some advertising class as a case study.

Is there a :30 of the commercial, too? It could be the agency guys were told by the client to shoot it for use as a :60 & a :30, getting 2 commercials from 1 shoot.

Excellent job Mogambo!
What editor are you using?
Enjoyed the experiment.
You documentary is going to kick ass.

Generally today when you do 60's you always do a 30 version that you can run, cut down from the 60. But something tells me our 30 second version would be too 'fast' for the people of the 50's and 60's and they would find it too confusing, not having grown up with MTV (or MuchMusic, in my case...)

(and yes, I write commercials for a living!)

I do agree that a 50s or 60s audience might not be to happy with the 30sec version. A long cinematographic learning process has happenend. Film structure is like a language of its own. In early silent movies people were scared of things that were show larger that their natural size, like a human head filling the entire screen, people left the cinema screaming. Or the whole sense of directions that now is not really worth mentioning: Gangster runs down a corridor and opens a door to the left and enters a new room on the right. Makes perfectly sense. But not to the early film folks. This is all stuff that was learned the hard way The down cut version lost quite some nice parts. I cut away a slow nice melodic intro, an instrumental bridge part that gave time to enjoy the luau atmosphere and a nice harmonic ending. I am happy that you enjoyed this little experiment.

The DVD of Tiki
http://www.armchair-travelling.com

[ Edited by: Mogambo on 2004-11-26 04:47 ]

Mogambo --

If I had the art, I would pare this clip down to 3 min.s and lay in the weirder parts of Combustible Edison's "Solid State" as the background score --

http://www.archive.org/movies/details-db.php?collection=prelinger&collectionid=08389a