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Lucky Strike Cigarette Commercial: "Square Dance" 1948 American Tobacco Company
🕑 Added 2019-05-18 19:02:21 +0000 UTCmore at http://quickfound.net/
Stop-motion animation of square-dancing cigarettes makes a Lucky Strike cigarette commercial.
Originally a public domain film, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_Strike
Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Lucky Strike is an American brand of cigarettes owned by the British American Tobacco groups. Individual cigarettes of the brand are often referred to colloquially as "Luckies." Lucky Strike was the top-selling cigarette brand in the United States during the 1930s and '40s...
Name
The Lucky Strike brand was introduced as chewing tobacco in the United States in 1871 by the company R.A. Patterson. The brand's founder was inspired by the era's rush for gold searching. Only some of the gold diggers (about four out of each 1000) were fortunate enough to find gold and this was often referred to as a "lucky strike".
By choosing this expression as the product's name, it implied consumers who were choosing the brand were lucky, as they were choosing a top-quality blend. Despite originally being a brand of chewing tobacco, by the early 1900s, Lucky Strike had evolved into a cigarette.
A well-circulated myth is that the name "Lucky Strike" refers to the fact that some cigarette packs contained marijuana, thus getting a "lucky strike" in receiving one of these. This, according to Snopes, is considered simply an urban legend, and not true.
The brand was first introduced by R.A. Patterson of Richmond, Virginia, in 1871 as cut-plug chewing tobacco and later a cigarette. In 1905, the company was acquired by the American Tobacco Company (ATC).
In 1917, the brand started using the slogan, "It's Toasted", to inform consumers about the manufacturing method in which the tobacco is toasted rather than sun-dried, a process touted as making the cigarettes taste delicious.
In the late 1920s, the brand was sold as a route to thinness for women, one typical ad said, "Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet." Sales of Lucky Strikes increased by more than 300% during the first year of the advertising campaign. Sales went from 14 billion cigarettes in 1925 to 40 billion in 1930, making Lucky Strike the leading brand nationwide...
The brand's signature dark-green pack was changed to white in 1942. In a famous advertising campaign that used the slogan "Lucky Strike Green has gone to war", the company claimed the change was made because the copper used in the green color was needed for World War II...
Famed industrial designer Raymond Loewy was challenged by company president George Washington Hill to improve the existing green and red package, with a $50,000 bet at stake. Loewy changed the background from green to white, making it more attractive to women, as well as cutting printing costs by eliminating the need for green dye. He also placed the Lucky Strike target logo on both sides of the package, a move that increased both visibility and sales. Hill paid off the bet.
The message "L.S./M.F.T." ("Lucky Strike means fine tobacco") was introduced on the package in 1945.
Lucky Strike was one of the brands included in the C-rations provided to US combat troops during the Second World War. Each C ration of the time included, among other items, nine cigarettes of varying brands because at the time, top military brass thought that tobacco was essential to the morale of soldiers fighting on the front lines. The other cigarette brands included in the C-rations were Camel, Chelsea, Chesterfield, Craven "A"-Brand, Old Gold, Philip Morris, Player's, Raleigh, and Wings...
In 1978 and 1994, export and US rights were purchased by Brown & Williamson...
As a result of British American Tobacco (BAT) buying out American Tobacco Company in 1976, Lucky Strike came under control of BAT...
