Public information films/Public service announcements

[Michelle Garvey]

My mother's smoked for years. She has a lot of problems as a result. A lot of money is sucked up by buying them for her but she doesn't care.

 

[Formeruser012523]

Was always partial to these ads, myself.

 

[MissMittens]

The legendary example of this genre in the US is the "Crying Indian," first shown in 1970 and run pretty much continuously on every TV station in the country into the 1980s.

But not all is what it seems. For one thing, the Crying Indian is no such thing. He may be crying, but Iron Eyes Cody was no Indian at all -- he was an Italian-American movie actor who played so many Native American roles in films of the 1930s and 40s that he eventually began living the role offscreen as well. It wasn't until after his death that his true origin was known.

But worse than that is the origin of the spot itself. It was distributed by the Advertising Council, which began in the 1940s as a controlled front for the National Organization of Manufacturers -- a way for that ultra-right-wing big-business oriented lobbying group to issue propaganda without having to use its own letterhead. This particular spot was produced and promoted by "Keep America Beautiful," which sounded nice until you discovered that it was and is a front for a coalition of beverage and packaging manufacturers looking to undermine bottle-deposit and litter control laws then being promoted in various states as a counterreaction to the explosion of "No Deposit No Return" garbage over the landscape. By promoting litter as an "individual" problem rather than one having its origin in proft-driven corporate policies to promote certain types of packaging, the spot carefully sweeps industrial responsibility for the situation away with a dash of buckskin, tom-toms, and sniffles. Not cool, Boys.

He wasn't the first, and he's certainly not the last, but he is the most well known fake among Native people and settler society alike.

He married a Navajo woman and had children with her, so while he was no Native himself (except of Sicily), he left a complicated legacy that his children have been forced to unpack on a daily basis.

 

[Michelle Garvey]

This is the female child version of a well known British PSA (they did a male child version as well). The man doing the voice over is in a lot of British adverts and PIFS from this period.

 

[LizzieMaine]

 

[Fading Fast]

As a kid, didn't it seem that those tests only ran during the critical part of the cartoon and never during a commercial or some boring adult show?

 

[Bushman]

One of these popped up on my TV the other day.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The fun part was getting to run the radio versions of those tests. Every year you got a sealed red envelope from federal civil defense headquarters with a list of monthly code words printed on the outside -- and inside the envelope were counter-codes which would validate procedures in the event of an actual emergency. The envelope was only to be opened in the event of an actual alert, which made it seem sinister and frightening. We kept it tacked to the wall over the teletype machine, and nobody ever dared to steam it open and peek.

 

[ChiTownScion]

Ah, the joys of getting my little sister to join me running through the house and our screaming, "AIR RAID! AIR RAID! THE RUSSIAN MISSLES ARE COMING!! " when we saw these on television.

Dad thought it was funny. Mom.. not so much.

 

[MissMittens]

The fun part was getting to run the radio versions of those tests. Every year you got a sealed red envelope from federal civil defense headquarters with a list of monthly code words printed on the outside -- and inside the envelope were counter-codes which would validate procedures in the event of an actual emergency. The envelope was only to be opened in the event of an actual alert, which made it seem sinister and frightening. We kept it tacked to the wall over the teletype machine, and nobody ever dared to steam it open and peek.

Now everyone is once again pushing the nuclear weapons envelope, it boggles the mind that the feds aren't doing any work in the area of Civil Defense, seemingly working with only state EOC's on emergency preparedness