2000s PSAs were BRUTAL
Added 2025-06-25 05:26:34 +0000 UTCAnd now I'll never be able to listen to Samantha Mumba without thinking "they say the guy without the seatbelt did the damage"
Please share your horrifyingly effective PSAs in the comments :D
Comments
There's Rachael Leigh Cook in the "This is your brain on drugs" PSAs where she trashes an apartment with a cast iron skillet.
Steve
2025-07-06 01:51:51 +0000 UTCCanada had an ad that encouraged people to engage in critical thinking? That needs to be exported, urgently.
Fenrir Wolfganger
2025-06-28 22:45:35 +0000 UTCuk early 2000s road safety ad, "Its 30 for a reason road safety advert" on youtube
SpicyMcHàggi
2025-06-27 04:09:33 +0000 UTCHouse hippos in Canada to promote critical thinking. But they didn't hit as hard.
Jeff Titterington
2025-06-26 04:26:10 +0000 UTCThis is one of the videos shown in the driver training portion of our new hire orientation I teach monthly. I hate this PSA so much…
Kyle Norris
2025-06-25 22:16:03 +0000 UTCI forgot about the traumatizing workplace safety ones until someone (Jean-Sebastien Roy) mentioned them here. And then I went looking and got retraumatized. I found a compilation, link's at the bottom if anyone's interested. But I remember a bunch of fun ones from Concerned Children's Advertisers' (CCA) from my childhood. Any Canadian whose seen it will tell you that the House Hippos ad was great. (Not intense just lost of fun, and some good nostalgia for us. Here's the House Hippos one if anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvPwJQXzHm0 Fun Fact is that it did so well they updated it twice, once to keep up and once again for AI. Update: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RCPu2l4Xvk AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r1L9NtBHRI While looking for another non-traumatizing favourite ("Boutique") I found this: https://www.youtube.com/@ccacanada and rediscovered a bunch: "The Chase" and "Smart as You" were also fun, so was "Blown Away". It has a bunch of the Concerned Children's Advertisers' ones. Sadly not Astar the Robot (which was from WarAmps) "Don't Put It In Your Mouth" nor "Don't Put It In Your Mouth" which was from the CCA but it's on the internet elsewhere. Workplace Safety PSAs (WSIB) Compilation (the video quality isn't great but the anxiety and remembered trauma I got from watching the first one is very real. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UvXhyMAozg
Susannah
2025-06-25 21:34:48 +0000 UTCNot just Americans. Some of those play in Canada too.
Susannah
2025-06-25 21:18:52 +0000 UTCI think most Americans can agree we have been hurt by Sara Mclaughlin though with "In the arms of an angel"
Sara Moseley
2025-06-25 21:13:11 +0000 UTCWe had that exact same PSA in driving school in Iowa in the USA...and I can vouch for it being effective. As soon as I saw the girl in the blue shirt I remembered it, and that was nineteen years ago.
Cassandra
2025-06-25 21:03:17 +0000 UTCThis is what I was thinking of when talking about Canadian PSAs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH3ZC0v42Eo
Samuel Smith
2025-06-25 20:57:53 +0000 UTCI'm from Canada and my country is known for having rather intense PSA. Seriously, look some up on youtube
Jean-Sébastien Roy
2025-06-25 15:58:17 +0000 UTCForever burned in my mind is a print anti-smoking PSA that was up in my elementary school with a person just covered in tar with the tagline "If what happened on your insides happened on your outsides, would you still smoke?" I was maybe 7 when I first saw it?? Nightmare fuel.
Brenton Clark
2025-06-25 15:28:52 +0000 UTCWell, I had to go find it on YouTube and wow. That was brutal indeed. Although not much worse than the "carnage on the highway" type films they showed us in Driver's Ed back in the 70s. (And those dated from the 50s.)
JCfromNC
2025-06-25 13:19:15 +0000 UTCThat was a 90s update of the boring dude with “this is your brain on drugs.” The PSA that showed a guy in an ambulance er…expiring because of cocaine use and then a sports announcer (Bob Costas, maybe?) talking about the dangers was particularly shocking. I think it was made in the aftermath of the Len Bias story, but they were serious about it being seen. They gave up ad time during the Super Bowl four years later specifically for that.
jmundt33a
2025-06-25 12:35:06 +0000 UTCI think this one was specific to the USA, but the "this is your brain on heroin" where Rachael Leigh Cook when to town on a kitchenette with a cast iron frying pan will never not make me flinch.
Haldon Lindstrom
2025-06-25 12:22:10 +0000 UTCI remember those from Driver's Ed in 2003 (!). Just because the footage was old didn't make it any less horrifying.
Haldon Lindstrom
2025-06-25 12:20:23 +0000 UTCThe California Highway Patrol produced a series of drivers’ education films starting in 1960. These films contained actual, uncensored footage of the aftermath of fatal and near-fatal auto accidents. They’re called Red Asphalt.
Michael Witry
2025-06-25 12:06:26 +0000 UTCthere were several anti-drug PSAs (also from the 2000s) that were particularly uncomfortable/in questionable taste. One involved the drowning of a small child and the tagline "just tell your mom you were too high to watch him."
Robert Calhoun
2025-06-25 11:24:42 +0000 UTCIn Denmark there was another for seatbelts where a tradesman goes into a bakery and orders a baked good called a 'håndværker' (tradesman) without seatbelt. then procedes to bash it until the fillings splatters out and the thing itself is a pulp, his face entirely deadpan throughout. Another one was for the oglers at an accident, I think, where the victim knocks on the ogler's window (clearly a manifestation) and gives him the eyeful he wants.
Therese Knøs
2025-06-25 10:50:50 +0000 UTCThere were a series about smoking that ended with people using electrolarynxes. I find those tools super creepy and disturbing.
Taia Hartman
2025-06-25 10:34:59 +0000 UTCThere was a Canadian workplace safety one with a perky young female sous-chef working in a kitchen who is talking about her planned wedding that won’t be happening because she’s about to begin a long treatment program, followed by showing her slipping on the flooring between a lack of non-slip matting, a greasy floor, and her sneakers, resulting in her spilling a large stock pot of some boiling substance over herself. It got to me especially because of a personal history of a horror of burns of any kind, and a familiarity of the medical torture that degree of burn over the body can be. ETA - not a teenaged one, for me, nor even relevant for my working life at the time. Just hauntingly effective.
SendPenguins
2025-06-25 10:22:57 +0000 UTCA UK one with fireman outside a gutted house, inside was scrawled on a burned wall "Why no smoke alarm Daddy" surrounded by little handprints. From India, I don't know was it deliberate or not. I visited Bangalore three times over 2005/6 and there was a sign giving the number of road deaths so far that year. Except it stopped at August 2003 and I don't know did they stop bothering or was it to make drivers think "how many since?" The slogan was: "Speed thrills It also kills"
Fenrir Wolfganger
2025-06-25 10:13:41 +0000 UTCOur Institute of Public Health had a campaign where the slogan was "most suicides are done with a knife and a fork." To get people to eat healthier. And of course, anti-smoking PSAs which shows damaged lungs are always fun.
Anders
2025-06-25 09:50:07 +0000 UTC... That did not need subtitles. I'll say this for that video, you'll watch it through to the end
Fenrir Wolfganger
2025-06-25 09:48:15 +0000 UTCWhat I love about the Illinois one, just saw on YouTube, is there's three; one for the whites, the blacks and the Hispanics. What I don't love is they thought they had to do three.
Fenrir Wolfganger
2025-06-25 09:36:56 +0000 UTCBritish... little kid ghost saying 'you didn't stop' to a driver...
Sarah Knife
2025-06-25 08:22:16 +0000 UTCOh yes, they were brutal. Climbing Pylons Can Kill! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGngGiVQfqU There was one about the electrified rail on train tracks too that haunts me but I can't find it.
Cynical Rhys
2025-06-25 08:20:34 +0000 UTCPSA as in Public... Safety? Advertisement?? I usually read it as the German version for Personal Safety Gear :D Anyways, there is a German short film that is quite infamous for its depiction of Health and Safety violations: "Staplerfahrer Klaus" (forklift driver Klaus) can be easily found online, but I'm not sure if you can find a version with English subtitles...
David M
2025-06-25 08:08:15 +0000 UTCFrance's PSA were notoriously mild so one year they decided to import a couple of British ones, including one similar to yours here. Kind of ruined by the fact that they drive on the "wrong" side of the road by french perspective.
Eloise (San1984)
2025-06-25 06:27:07 +0000 UTC"This is your brain on drugs" scrambled eggs. Then Illinois did one about wearing seatbelts in a zombie apocalypse.
Sara Moseley
2025-06-25 05:34:39 +0000 UTCWell you can't say they mince their words XD
Jill Bearup
2025-06-25 05:33:32 +0000 UTCHere in Australia we had a whole series of ads with the tagline: "If you drink and drive you're a bloody idiot."
Timothy Hopper
2025-06-25 05:29:49 +0000 UTC
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