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My YA Agony Awards inspired a showdown of traumatizing PSAs -- with links to the actual PSAs on youtube!
ETA: Oops, now down to the quarterfinals.
The UK does some damn horrifying PSAs. Like Donald Pleasance gloating over death by water. And the sentence "The last sound Jenny ever heard was her own neck snapping." And the profoundly disturbing Amnesty International commercial. And the zombie child. And the bombing raid on the Smurf village. I gather that some of these air before movies over there, so there is no escape.
When I was in high school in the 80s in California, the entire school was forced to watch WWII-era videos of venereal diseases, including gonorrhea sores and a man whose chest wall had been eaten away by syphilis, so that you could see his skin balloon in and out when he breathed. I think some kids fainted.
After that, we had to watch a presentation by some conservative group that said, "Yes, condoms are ninety percent effective, but that means that out of every hundred of you who use them, ten of you will get AIDS and DIE." I sat there thinking, "This is going to be the next bio class lesson in 'lying with statistics--'" a pet peeve of my excellent bio teacher.
Then they used duct tape as a metaphor for sex, and said that if we had sex before marriage our tape would be all ripped and dirty and no one would want it.
That was also the decade of the "brain on drugs" commercials: "This is your brain." Egg. "This is your brain on drugs." Egg sizzles in frying pan. In a voice which promised that all questioners would be taken out and shot: "Any questions?!!"
What public service announcements terrorized you, as children or adults? How many of you are old enough to have been subjected to "in case of nuclear war, cower under your flimsy desk" drills?
ETA: Oops, now down to the quarterfinals.
The UK does some damn horrifying PSAs. Like Donald Pleasance gloating over death by water. And the sentence "The last sound Jenny ever heard was her own neck snapping." And the profoundly disturbing Amnesty International commercial. And the zombie child. And the bombing raid on the Smurf village. I gather that some of these air before movies over there, so there is no escape.
When I was in high school in the 80s in California, the entire school was forced to watch WWII-era videos of venereal diseases, including gonorrhea sores and a man whose chest wall had been eaten away by syphilis, so that you could see his skin balloon in and out when he breathed. I think some kids fainted.
After that, we had to watch a presentation by some conservative group that said, "Yes, condoms are ninety percent effective, but that means that out of every hundred of you who use them, ten of you will get AIDS and DIE." I sat there thinking, "This is going to be the next bio class lesson in 'lying with statistics--'" a pet peeve of my excellent bio teacher.
Then they used duct tape as a metaphor for sex, and said that if we had sex before marriage our tape would be all ripped and dirty and no one would want it.
That was also the decade of the "brain on drugs" commercials: "This is your brain." Egg. "This is your brain on drugs." Egg sizzles in frying pan. In a voice which promised that all questioners would be taken out and shot: "Any questions?!!"
What public service announcements terrorized you, as children or adults? How many of you are old enough to have been subjected to "in case of nuclear war, cower under your flimsy desk" drills?