Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Charlie Don't Smurf

When I was a kid, various animated anti-smoking, anti-drug, anti-bigotry, anti-forest-fire, anti-whatever public service announcements would freak me out. I'm talking about nightmares, wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night, haunting-me-decades-later freaking out. Somehow the late sixties and early seventies were the era of the grotesque animated PSA -- perhaps a lingering Timothy Leary effect.

How freaked out would I have been, though, to see the new Belgian UNICEF PSA -- in which a peaceful Smurf village is bombed into a flaming hell, Smurfette dies, and Baby Smurf is left crying uncontrollably? And this in Belgium, the home of the Smurfs. They supposedly want to get a reaction to their campaign to support African ex-child-soldiers-- and this should deliver.

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