I'm pretty sure by now most of the people reading this have seen the "Magical Amount" commercial made by the Truth organization. If not, here's the clip.
It starts out like a typical Truth commercial. Some guy holds a megaphone, yelling menacing statistics about tobacco usage at a crowd who for the most part look utterly bewildered. And to add even more of a "scare the general public into our tobacco free line of thinking" environment there are bear traps baited with cigarette packs littering the ground. The traps are a far cry from Truth's other visual aids (i.e. mannequin parts left in random places, chalk outlines, melting ice sculptures of pregnant women..) but they run pretty par for the course as far as the organization's campaigns go.
In this installment of Truth-o-ganda the audience gets to learn that some brilliant mind at a tobacco company figured out the right amount of nicotine to deliver a strong enough buzz to hook a consumer, but not enough to make them puke. So that's it. Thank you man with the megaphone. If I were an executive at a big company like Seven Star or Kool I would never ever concieve having enough business sense to include the right amount of addictive substance in my product. Not too much to turn the consumer off and not too little to turn them lethargic. Bloody brilliant.
The little man with the megaphone informs the crowd that this pinch of nicotine is a "magical amount." His token black sidekick just grins at this and then a cartoon unicorn prances over reinforcing the magical amount statement.
Wait...magical unicorn? What kind of "magical amount " are they talking about?! I stubbed my cigarette out at this point and reached for the remote to turn the volume up on the TV set to make sure I was hearing right. A few seconds after the unicorn appears, megaphone man and token black man begin a nice little ditty and dance about the "magical amount" with the magical equine and are soon joined by a horde of other mythological creatures. Leprechauns, elves, pre-greying lawn gnomes and even fairies that swoop from the gutter twittering about death by arsenic.
The campaign turned from an ominous and well thought out ad about the dangers of smoking to an explosion of animated madness of Nickelodeon proportions. I had to rub my eyes a few times during the last fifteen seconds of the segment to make sure I wasn't tripping my balls off. Nothing was missing from my stash so I knew that this commercial was for real.
May I just say....WTF Truth? It's bad enough your organization exists in the first place. Whenever I go out and buy a pack a cigarettes (which is quite often, I smoke more than a salaryman during a recession) I know full well what I'm getting into. There's even a warning from the Surgeon General stamped right on the box that tells me that if I let the product into my lungs...I'm going to die..or have sick babies...or something else horrible. I don't need a pack of megaphone toting, dreadlock wearing, faux college students raising funding and a ruckus about the blatantly obvious dangers of smoke inhalation.
Since colonial times, tobacco has been a cornerstone of the American economy. Is smoking stupid? Yes. Nicotine dependency a weakness. You bet your sweet ass it is. Do I really care? Nope. I could be mowed down by a half blind senior citizen in a Cadillac while crossing an intersection tomorrow. There are a over a million different gory and agonizing ways my life could be ended (2 off the top my head I could think to include poprocks). If the Truth people devoted their resources, clever advertising and cracked out animation staff to an issue that actually needs resolving the Union might actually be a better place. Send the arsenic warning fairies to work against rape, let the unicorn patrol against gang violence, and how about the leprechauns form a brigade against child molestation. It'd be a much better use of funding than trying to stop an industry that the U.S. government needs to line its pockets in the first place.
Let me start by saying that this is BY FAR the funniest blog I have ever read.
Now that that's out of the way, I like how you tore apart the propaganda of the anti-tobaco ads, as it is something most shy away from. I disagree with you in the area of having Truth at all, because although much of their information may not be "acurate," I'm all for anti-smoking PSA's, as smoking is bad for our health, and I'd rather not be around others smoking (although there really is no health risk in second hand smoke and of the two major studies on second hand smoke, the first was thrown out by a federal court because they had "cherry-picked" their data and the second shows that there is no evidence of harm in second hand smoke, yet they say the exact opposite in their press release).
I agree that this commercial was obviously not the best ever created, but anti-smoking adds still have some importance. They're important to help keep people from starting smoking, and even if they are not effective on you personally, some adds have gotten results.
Haha. Funny! I like the ones about weed. What's up with the alien snatching peoples' girlfriends, and the dog with the floating thought bubbles? The commercials are kinda ridiculous, but they do get peoples' attention. You have to remember that while you know and understand the surgeon general's warning, the majority of the US reads at below the 8th grade level and does need magical unicorns to help them understand why smoking can hurt them.
Find out everything you need to know about poop here:
http://progressiveu.org/000701-everything-you-need-know-about-poop