The 50s: Sky King and program sponsorship
In the late 40s and into the 50s, some children's shows, like other shows, started on radio before making the transition to television. One such example is Sky King starring Kirby Grant and Gloria Winters. Sky King was about a rancher from Southern Arizona who captured bad guys using his airplane, a Cessna T-50 affectionately known as "The Songbird".
During its run, Sky King was sponsored by Peter Pan peanut butter and then eventually by Nabisco. During this era, television shows had exclusive sponsors which had advertising messages embedded into the show openings.
Here are two clips from Sky King. The clip on the right is an opening for the show that features a Nabisco commercial embedded into it. The theme of the commercial matches the "western" motif of the show. Some may say that young viewers may not be able to distinguish the commercial message from the actual programs in clips like this:
The 60s: Cartoons and the truth about The Flintstones
Prior to television, cartoons were short subject films that played before the feature films. This would go into the late 60s with studios like MGM producing cartoons featuring Tom and Jerry and Warner Brothers with their Looney Tunes.
During this time, Hanna Barbera was producing cartoon shows intended for television. Characters such as Yogi Bear, Wally Gator and Huckleberry Hound became household names. Back in 1958, Hanna Barbera produced The Huckleberry Hound Show which featured shorts from various Hanna Barbera characters wrapped into a single show. Host selling was alive and well. Here's a 1958 introduction for The Huckleberry Hound Show where the advertising mascot (in this case, the Kellogg's Corn Flakes rooster is the star of the show:
Over the years, The Flintstones has been considered a children's program. The various offshoots of the original show such as The Pebbles and Bammm Bamm Show and The Flintstones Comedy Hour were produced for network saturday morning line-ups, but the original series was not. The original series debuted in 1960 in prime time. The Flintstones was considered a situation comedy and a spoof of The Honeymooners. In the first two seasons of this "adult" sitcom, they also had a very "adult" sponsor, Winston cigarettes:
In 1970, Congress passed the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act which in part, outlawed cigarette advertising on TV and radio.
