TFTP's Monochrome March Will Return After These Messages: Miscellaneous Commercial Block from the 1950s

Posted to YouTube by user 'MattTheSaiyan'
Length - 12:25

College basketball has March Madness. TFTP: Television from the Past has Monochrome March! 

For the entire month of March, TFTP brings you posts featuring monochrome programs and clips in glorious black-and-white!

And every Wednesday, TFTP takes a break from regular programming to bring you a selection of classic commercials. Monochrome March will return after these messages...

This block of commercials from the 1950s features (among other products) cigarettes, bread, autos, and soap products. There are ads for Palmolive bar soap (for the "schoolgirl complexion look"), Snickers candy bars (an animated look at the layers of a Snickers bar), Jello Instant Pudding, and Spic & Span cleaning solution. There are three different Camel cigarette ads--two of which are animated, one with a lion tamer and lion, the other featuring water skiing. There are also three different Sunbeam bread ads--and only one of them is the same as those TFTP featured a few weeks ago.

As we begin to wrap up this year's Monochrome March, it's worth considering how different these ads are from those we are familiar with today. To begin with, they're much longer; a couple of the ads here clock in at around two minutes. Animation was much more prevalent in ads from the 1950s and '60s; animation is almost never used in commercials now. And there is an unmistakable air of innocence to many of these ads--a girl jump-roping to sell Sunbeam bread, clean-cut teenagers featured in the Palmolive ad. Heck, even in the cigarette ads the worst thing going on is whether or not the cigarettes will irritate your throat.

Maybe, in that era, things really were more black and white.

TFTP's Monochrome March Will Return After These Messages: Sunbeam Bread ads from the 1950s/60s

Posted to YouTube by user 'MattTheSaiyan' (top), 'Vintage Fanatic' (bottom)
Length - 1:11 (top), 1:03 (bottom)

College basketball has March Madness. TFTP: Television from the Past has Monochrome March! 

For the entire month of March, TFTP brings you posts featuring monochrome programs and clips in glorious black-and-white!

And every Wednesday, TFTP takes a break from regular programming to bring you a selection of classic commercials. Monochrome March will return after these messages...

Here's a pair of black-and-white commercials for Sunbeam bread from the monochrome era of the 1950s and '60s. The first ad features two animated figures, a jump-roping little girl and a Sunbeam baker (complete with the puffy hat). A fairly obnoxious jingle plays, seemingly sung by the girl and baker as female and male voices alternate. "Sunbeam energy" is the theme of the ad, as a title with this message is superimposed on live-action images of Sunbeam bread.

The second ad takes the "sun" in Sunbeam literally, with a parable of a sunbathing fellow who is unconvincingly said to have "vim, vigor, and vitality" from eating Sunbeam bread. He frolics with his family, picnicking on the beach (sandwiches made with Sunbeam bread, natch) and playing with a beach ball with his daughter.