These posts celebrate the movie trailers, movie posters, commercials, print ads, and other promotional material that stand as their own works of art. 

Even as I roll my eyes and grit my teeth as transparent shilling for products infiltrates ever deeper into U.S. media offerings, I must admit to an abiding affection for the way the early days of television were filled with overt sponsor pitches, often baked right into the programs. There’s something charming about the way everything stopped so characters could expound on the virtues of soap flakes or breakfast cereals.

And then there were the incorporated spots that now look wonderfully absurd, such as a couple of modern Stone Age buddies enjoying a smoke together. Although The Flintstones have long since been relegated to the kid-friendly parts of the cable dial, when the program originally aired, in the nineteen-sixties, it wasn’t really viewed as family fare. It was just another sitcom, The Honeymooners reimagined with caveman jokes. So why wouldn’t Winston cigarettes sign up as a sponsor? And that meant a couple cartoon characters would get to sample the tobacco company’s wares on national television.