From SOTU to Mad Men

I decided to dovetail the comment from the SOTU address last night about the best of Kennedy and Reagan with my love of the series Mad Men and ended up looking at some old campaign commercials:

In one episode the staff at the advertising agency of Sterling Cooper is asked to work for the Nixon campaign. They spend some time reviewing the competition’, meaning Kennedy’s, commercials. In an “AHA!” moment I realized that in all likelihood the producers of Mad Men got the footage from the Internet Archive from this compilation:

http://www.archive.org/details/Election_Ads

In it there is a commercial with Harry Belafonte. I just finished reading David Bianculli’s book about the Smothers Brother and Harry Belafonte’s appearances there. An Internet Archive search of the Smothers Brothers yielded a top result of “Tales of the Rat Fink: Trailer“.

Gotta check that one out.

-Jeff Kaplan