The Beautiful, Horrifying, Fascinating World of PSAs, Part III

I'm looking for one of those surreal animated anti-smoking PSAs that ran on Canadian TV in the seventies. We got a CBC channel in my home town, and those things gave me a few nightmares.



But for now, here's a slightly more recent live-action one from the Great North:




And here's an article from Esquire on what the writer considers the Five Most Disturbing Public Service Announcements of All Time, featuring PSAs (including some from Canada and Britain) that are way too nasty for me to embed on this blog. (They really want people to see this stuff on TV?)

The Beautiful, Horrifying, Fascinating World of PSAs, Part I

Various anti-stuff (anti-drug, anti-smoking, anti-pollution) public service announcements played a big part in my young psyche, probably in part because I watched too much TV and in part because the nastier, creepier ones stuck in my mind and kept me up late at night. Heck, some of them can still freak me out -- even though I'm in my forties, and never smoked or used drugs. (And I avoid littering.)

The PSAs of my youth have been turning up on YouTube. Here's a terrific one that started in the mid-sixties, and kept running into the early seventies.



In Communications 101, Professor Jeffrey Cole taught that in the '60's the FCC required anti-smoking PSAs to be run in the same proportion as the cigarette commercials stations were running. Then came the ban on cigarette advertising on TV. Who was behind the ban? Big Tobacco -- those PSAs were eating into its bottom line.

This is an example of an animated PSA. The animated ones were often more powerful, mainly because they were surreal and more chaotic. Here's a particularly effective one featuring that scourge of the old west, Johnny Smoke:



And on a lighter note, here's an anti-littering ad I saw a lot in the seventies:



There's a longer version which I rarely saw.

And speaking of anti-litter commercials, here's the all-time classic, with Iron Eyes Cody: