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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?
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We had drills and they ran the air raid sirens once a month to make sure they worked and yes, we had to hide under desks.
Looking back on it now, it all seems quite foolish, but I remember as a child, so sure I'd have to use a fallout shelter some day.
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Also, I am mentally scarred by the description of the syphilis video. OMG THAT IS HORRIFYING.
This one caused any number of sleepless nights for me when I was little. It didn't make it past the first round, but watching it now, it really is kind of silly-looking.
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The only horrifying PSA I can recall is a school bus safety film from elementary school that ended with a girl climbing up on a snowbank next to the bus, slipping off it and landing under the wheel which ran over and killed her. The sex film was animated and about 40 years old and starred Betty Boop. It made next to no sense.
The worst experience I had, though, weren't PSAs. When I was in Hebrew School, starting in about the 5th or 6th grade they would show us concentration camp films as part of our education on the Holocaust. These were raw and graphic and they would preface the showings by telling the students that if we felt the need to vomit, we did not need to ask permission to leave the room, but could just leave and go to the lavatory. It was awful and at that age I was nowhere near ready for it.
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Fire Safety!
Narrator: "Touch the doorknob. If the fire is outside the door, the knob will be warm. Don't go out. Stuff wet towels under the door and wait for help to arrive. Or climb out a window!"
Me, at 5: My bedroom is on the second floor. Also, the bathroom where both water and towels are is outside the door. I am doomed.
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Re: Fire Safety!
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Not that we didn't have plenty of traumatizing moments. I was in the advanced biology class in 9th grade, and one day we got separated into the boys and the girls and watched the Nova show on human reproduction, which included film of a woman giving birth. That was far more effective than any other anti-sex or safe-sex message could have been, however, as all of us girls walked out of the classroom going I AM NEVER GOING TO HAVE A BABY OR SEX EVER EVER EVER EVER. And I was in a health class where the teacher - who was also the girls' volleyball coach - did what I can only describe as interpretive dance to illustrate the sentence "The uterus sloughs its lining every month." And she repeated it 2 or 3 times to drive the point home. I REMEMBER IT VIVIDLY TO THIS DAY, IT WAS THAT TRAUMATIZING.
We had duck-and-cover drills, but as we were in Tornado Alley, they were actually useful, to minimize injuries caused by flying glass and such if a tornado were to hit the school. :D
The one PSA we were shown in school that made an impact on me was a fire-safety one. It had a family in a two-story home that had a fire and because they had a fire safety plan in place, they all survived. Naturally, that wasn't the part that affected me. The makers of the film knew the propensity of kids to go "Cool!" and imitate anything dangerous they saw in PSAa, and therefore showed a fire starting in a completely impossible way: one of the kids, when they finished playing an electronic game of some sort, unplugged the cord and threw it into a cardboard box, where the contact of the metal prongs on the unplugged plug to the cardboard caused a fire to start.
TO THIS DAY I CANNOT STAND THE PRONGS OF A PLUG TOUCHING ANYTHING FLAMMABLE EVEN THOUGH I KNOW IT'S COMPLETE BOLLOCKS.
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Oh thank god I'm not the only person who had that exact same experience (and reaction).
I mean, of course you know how babies are born at that age, but that still doesn't mean you need to see it graphically and bloodily depicted--especially not when bio class is at 7 a.m. Eurgh.
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I saw my first birth video in college (artsy film for a flim class), when I had a much better first-hand sense of my vagina and its various uses, and god, that was...when will they invent the uterine replicator, already?
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I always loved the ballerina and the runner anti-drug, with the voiceover that goes, "No one ever says, 'I want to be a junkie when I grow up.' I can't tell you how many of us went around telling our parents that that's precisely what we wanted to be when we got older.
I'm also amused by the newer ones that intone things like, "Tell your grandmother you couldn't visit her because you were stoned," "Tell your mom you lost your sister because you were high," etc. They're just laughably bad with the guilt-tripping.
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But you have to do the dance with me.
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My favorite is the fairly recent one where the two kids get high and find dad's loaded rifle and one of them gets shot. Let's see... is marijuana actually the problematic element in this scenario?
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When I was in high school in California in the 1970s -- an all-girl Catholic school, mind you -- the nuns brought in a doctor to talk to us about birth control when we were freshmen. (I think they thought that better we sinned through using birth control if we were going to have sex than get pregnant and drop out or be put in the quandary of whether or not to get an abortion, which had just become legal in the state but which, of course, was and is still prohibited by the Church.)
The doctor showed us the different types of birth control devices available at the time and told us the success/failure rate of each. There was no judgment implied, no pressure, and no scare tactics.
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Of course, in a different class they showed us films of abortions being performed, so it all sort of balances out. I was a politically aware fifteen-year-old so I found the latter really manipulative. (Especially the one with the talking chipmunk-voiced fetus. I mean, I'd have thought that the TCVF would have made the film's protagonist WANT to get an abortion.)
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Horrible, horrible movie. I've never heard of anyone else who was subjected to it.
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We had air raid drills where we would line up in the hallways with our arms over our heads. Yes, like that was going to save us if a nuclear missile hit!
Hugs!
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STHpMUYeznQ&oref
both in terms of "shocking graphic gore" and in terms of the tagline.
Someone on my parenting bulletin board linked to it because she found it gruesomely hilarious. It made me laugh out loud (in a horrified way).
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