Discussion Main / NoSmoking

There appears to be a "bye" for comedy and drama shows from The '50s and The '60s where it appears to be accepted that in the black-and-white dark ages of TV entertainment, everybody smoked and it's therefore pointless to edit or censor. This is definitely a thing in British TV with so many nostalgia channels springing up. Reruns of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (1969-70) might as well have been filmed through a perma-fog of cigarette smoke. The lead characters in The Sweeney smoke like factory chimneys, too. just wondering if anyone can definitively point to where the change happened, the point where TV producers said "whoa, too much smoking". My guess is it began in The '80s in Britain and gradually tightened over the following decade - would the USA have seen the same?

I pulled this from the Marvel example:

• However, Wolverine quit smoking before that, so this really didn't affect him that much.
• The reason Wolverine had to quit was because he became a popular enough character that kids might copy him, so presumably if it had actually mattered how either character was portrayed they'd have quit anyway. The excuse about Quesada's father could be accurate (as there are those who feel he's made far too many editorial decisions based on personal bias) but there's a possibility it's something to do with Disney buying out Marvel.

According to Comic Book Legends Revealed, Wolverine quit smoking as part of the same 2001 ban as the other characters. (Actually, even that's not quite right, it's more accurate to say that Wolverine was retroactively said to have quit smoking to explain why he was never shown smoking after 2001.) The Disney buy-out, meanwhile happened in 2009.

It's possible people have forgotten just how long Joey Q was Running the Asylum for.