Wonder if that inspired a poster PSA I saw. How are you getting home tonight? is the caption. There is a taxi, a police car, an ambulance and a hearse, all parked outside a cemetery. Very sobering.
'tentacle' has always hit hard for me.. specifically the scene where the girl is on a date with someone and theyre touching her leg, and the tentacle shows up, and the scene where she is much older and at a family gathering or dinner and the tentacle shows up and her smile drops. i always saw it as the memories of what happened coming back in different scenarios. another one i saw was a black screen while a man is screaming at his son, being abusive. on the screen it says "you neighbours will hear you. but don't worry, they won't say anything. because people don't know what to say." which is.. hard to watch..
the PSA about keeping lights on to stop people from breaking in is why my mother has things in place to turn lights on at night whenever she stays out the house for long periods of time
My grandparents do this whenever they go out, leaving the living room light on as well as having their Alexa play the radio. I don’t know if they ever saw the psa, I’m more willing to bet they learned it from their own families considering their age, but it’s a good lesson to teach for people who don’t have good home security.
I’m a firm believer that the best way to make a PSA is to just be as blunt and straight forward as possible. You don’t need to make it artificially upsetting. Get someone who has been effected by the issue at hand and have them talk about how it’s impacted them. Reality is way more disturbing than fiction
A few examples because I’ve been thinking about this since I posted this comment: Want to warn the public over the use of hard drugs, alcohol or smoking? Interview someone who’s experienced them. Users who use consistently always show signs of their bodies breaking down. Heck, even for anti smoking adverts I genuinely believe the psas that interview someone who’s lost part of their body to cancers are the best people to have explain just how harmful smoking is. Want to warn people about the risks of drunk driving or not wearing a seatbelt? Interview the victims of these incidents. If someone has experienced it and they’re still alive, have them come on to talk about their life post event. If they’ve died, get a close friend or family member to pour their heart out. I think I remember one PSA that interviewed the mother of someone who died while going way too fast on a motorcycle. At the end of the ad they showed the gopro footage of the motorcyclist’s last moments and accident. You didn’t see any gore but it was still very upsetting to see. I think about that video a lot. You can use any kind of PSA worthy incident to warn people this way. The more realistic and raw it is, the more people are going to remember it for longer. Yes, some cases work well with depictions of cartoons (dumb ways to die for example) and those are usually more effective for kids. Other than that I genuinely believe that the more real these psa are, the better chance the public remember
To be fair, some people aren’t able to sympathize as easily with something they’re told about and need to see it in order to really get it through their head how horrible it is. Of course with a lot of these issues they can’t directly show the thing happening so it has to be shown through work arounds.
I mean, I think the child abuse ones in tier four are perfect executions of what needs to be done for that one. Sometimes you need to strap people down and forcibly hold their eyes open as you make them stare into the void.
An example of the drink driving one’s has to be one of my favorites and I talk about it a lot. If you haven’t guessed it is the jaquoline one. Before she shows her face she tells you how it impacted her. If you are observant for this psa before she shows her face you can see her hands and that is one of the visuals for this psa. Than she shows her face and it is a visual people will most likely pound into their brain. This psa has made me not want to drink and drive as seeing her face made me scared I could do that if I drink. That’s why I think the Jaquoline psa is really affective!
The “Tip from a former smoker” ads absolutely traumatized me. I remember the first one I ever saw was a Terry one. I was way younger and it played in the middle of the night. I was petrified. Ever since then, whenever I see the title card pop up I look turn it off. Hell, I didn’t even look at the screen during its segment on here, I just looked down.
Baby Monitor was the first PSA to make me cry. Dude, even if it’s not real, the situation itself happens with many children across the Globe, It hurts, the kids voice ☹️
6:38 that actually happened sadly. The woman called for "pizza" after her mom (I think it was) started getting assaulted by her husband or boyfriend. It took a minute for the operator to realize that this wasn't about pizza and started asking her coded questions like "do want some pepperoni (cops) on that pizza" and he knew what to do based on her answers. It's pretty surprising how she managed to stay as calm as she did.
My favorite PSAs was “Lolli” and the Amber Alert one. Lolli was about children pornography; it was a room filled with lollipops (which represented the number of victims) and there’s sentences that appear on the screen, starting with innocent statements like “I like my Lolli” and “my Lolli is yummy”, but the last sentence said “my Lolli grew up. Need another.”, which was a real dark web comment. The Amber Alert one was funny and relieving. Basically a woman was talking to a girl about ice cream until she sees a man watching her so she runs off with the girl, and more men surround her as she runs, making it seem like the men want to get the girl. She eventually gets corners/surrounded by a bunch of people and a police officer arrests her, when it’s revealed that she’s the kidnapper, and not the men. My top favorite, honestly.
The Disaster Action PSA references certain disasters that occurred in the UK prior to 1991, like the aforementioned 1988 Lockerbie disaster, in which Libyan terrorists had planted a bomb on Pan Am flight 103, killing everyone on board. Also, great video (as always).
The fucking _uncomfortably long empty silence_ in the Youth Ambassadors entry legit chilled me to my core, I know you wouldn't put in a jumpscare but my whole body got ready for one anyways.
The reason there are a lot of PSAs related to kid's cartoons in the 80s and 90s is because there were regulations at the time that Saturday morning cartoons had to have a certain amount of educational content. Though that really doesn't explain He-Man's, since that cartoon was syndicated, not aired on networks.
I wanna say first off absolutely immaculate choice in music, certified bangers every time. Secondly there is a PSA that got an entire animated series (technically, I guess). It's called Stay Alert Stay Safe and aired in Canada from the late 80s to late 90s that was basically an entire cartoon series teaching kids about street proofing (i.e. stranger danger, safe crossing, etc). It had an actual VHS release that was given away free to parents at Canadian Tire stores for a time and aired for a decade during the early-morning cartoon blocks generally when kids would be getting ready for school. Episodes were about 5 minutes long and it's not like it got merch or anything but they definitely gave it more television space than most PSA.
There's a PSA that wasn't covered here that I think disturbs me more than most. It's called Penguins or Ghost Birds and it's a PSA I think opposing big oil companies after major oil spills kill 100s of birds. Its rarely ever talked about on all the lists I've seen but I feel like it also deserves a mention. It stunned me the first time I saw it.
This is my favourite PSA ever. The reveal of the bird, the zoom out, no surprises as the backing and the “deep sea oil mining could be 10000x worse.” It doesn’t fuck around and it’s beautifully done. It's by Greenpeace and it is called Ghost Birds.
6:32 so you're telling me the NFL funded that PSA yet won't do anything to any player who pulls that exact same thing on their wife that's crazy and ridiculous. Like I'm happy they are trying to inform people what to do and support victims but come on let's support the message more and fire players who are hurting victims. And I know not all players do that but some do and nothing happens sadly from what I know
I think another really hard one to watch is the Australia's "20 years of TAC commercials, everybody hurts" psa. I was in a healthcare trauma course and the police major crash squad came to speak to us and showed us this and by the end pretty much everyone was crying.
36:13 Another fun fact: Donald Pleasence is also known for playing the character of Clarence "Doc" Tydon in the 1971 Australian-American-British film Wake in Fright, was originally banned due to its controversial content surrounding kangaroo killings and its negative portrayal of the locals and the outback lifestyle and was considered lost media until the mid-late 90s and 2000s when it was restored in 2009 for the Sydney Film Festival.
I had a PSA phase when I was about 14 and I happened to find this channel today. Is it weird to say that find PSAs like "Tentacle" and "Torture by another name" to be nostalgic since I'd watch them 4 years ago? I really learned a lot through PSAs. Well, the good ones, at least.
im so glad that someone else agrees that monsters isnt as scary as everyone makes it out to be. the only really scary thing is the monsters that the parents turn into, but honestly they arent that scary. maybe its just because ive been in situations like those in the psa but its never made me freaked out
man, so many of these PSAs put me on edge and scare me, but I keep coming back to them. it's not even like horror movie fun scared either idk why I do this to myself-
One PSA I saw years ago that stuck with me (I think it was part of a series?) was about keeping guns away from children. It had a series of crayon drawings and a child narrating about accidentally shooting his brother with an unlocked gun that was kept around the house. Does anyone else know this one?
A couple PSAs not featured that I found to be disturbing: The one where the lady is carrying a pot of boiling water in a kitchen at work, slips on water, and scalds her face off. The company made more super disturbing ads, but this one shocked and scared me the most. The ads running in Michigan about getting the COVID vaccine. They featured doctors telling stories about having to put people on life support, how hard it is to tell the family they might not make it. These ones struck me because I'm a nurse. A family in mourning because their loved one is dying is hard to see, but it's a lot more devastating when they couldn't see and support their loved ones. So those PSAs disturbed me because they hit home.
I love the Vince and Larry PSAs because of Lorenzo Music being in it. One of my favorite voice actors ever. He was Garfield in ofc Garfield but also the original voice actor for Peter Venkman in The Real Ghostbusters (1986 cartoon)
1:23:36 I found Photograph scary, not because the PSA was the best way to portray that concept (I think Faces by PFDFA or whatever that one is called did it better) but because the high contrast burnt the images of the guy's face into my mind, so I'd get after images every time I shut my eyes lol I find the scariest PSAs aren't always the best PSAs (though Nightvision TERRIFIED me when I was 12 or so and I find that one to be fairly effective)
Amazing work as usual. Not sure what it says about me that I STILL knew most of these... Regardless, glad to see some favorites getting some love here :)
2:04:52 reminds me of feu PSAs that eared in are country (and possibly in some other Slovenian countries (I don’t know if it was shown in other areas)) I remember there being at least two, where parents texted with there hid as they where on the way to pick them up from football/dance practice while the parents where shown in a black void as they moved specifically to eider make it look like they danced or kicked a football whilst glass flew around them, both ads ending with the child waiting.
I think one that fucked me up was a Fire safety PSA about this forgetful Dad and how it played out like Homer Simpson or Fred Flinstone with it playing kinda like a sitcom and shows the relationship he has with his wife and daughter until the end where he sobs out in a really realistic way and the camera pans out and shows the house is burned down and implies the Mother and Daughter were killed by the fire that was a result of the father forgetting to check the smoke alarms. Another one was this French Family Sexual abuse prevention ad taking place during Christmas. After watching a lot of PSAs you get this mentality that the world is a horrible place with tons of evil running around and it kinda gets you down, so recommend probably watching some wholesome videos. I don’t know if that happens to anyone else but it always does to me. Good video though, loved the Saint Pepsi in the background. Helped me through some of the more disturbing ones.
Thank you and I'm glad that my music choice helped when talking about such serious topics. But yeah PSAs definitely used to disturb me quite a lot but I'm at the point now where I have seen them that many times that most PSAs don't phase me aha
7:08 I’ve heard that since the shows at the time were considered “too extreme” for children and made it so that cartoons had to legally have an educational message or moral to teach children.
One of RSA's more memorable PSAs has to be the Safe Cross Code. Safe Cross Code has three videos from what i looked up, theres two videos that focus on Annie, and on Jack, but the last video is their most memorable video, the safe cross code dance. The videos on Jack and Annie are of the two different situations where they want to go across the road to meet up with their friends, but don't look left and right to make sure the roads are safe to cross and gts trapped behind glass before they step on the roads. The safe cross code dance is an informative song on the 6 steps a child would need to know on crossing the roads. (I actually am glad to comment all of this, it's just me using this video as an excuse to chatter on about RSA)
8:08 A fun fact about this series of PSAs is that one of them was sampled in the song "Charly" by The Prodigy: "Charly says, 'Always tell your mummy before you go off somewhere.'"
We had a semi PSA (it was an advertisement for an anti smoking product called Nicorette) here in England that was rather sinister. It showed people wearing giant cigarette outfits chasing down smokers kinda like how the zombies in 28 Weeks Later react. Then the smoker would always slap on a Nicorette patch and violently assault the cigarette people. lol
The brazilian partnership against drugs had a version of the Pee Wee/Clint Eastwood ads but it was actually scary, because it employed some weird images alongside it (it featured a kids tv presenter, two actors and two journalists). I think the scariest of the bunch was "my name is cocaine/crack" ones though, those ads featured a lady talking about the glamurous side of the drug and then turning more deranged as she also lists the side effects(the cocaine one is the better one).
I remember as a kid seeing two PSA's warning about infected misquote bites and how infected one's can carry dangerous illnesses. One was a young Athlete who almost died and the other one showed a pic of a little girl who died cause of it.
@50:00 according to comments on the (obviously age-restricted my GOD) RU-vid upload of Real Tracks, Real Life, Real Trains, the last person survived getting pulled underneath the train, but lost both of their legs; they gave consent to the footage being used. It wasn't as bad as some of the other PSAs I've seen but my god I can see why they got age restricted
Just about recently, I saw a PSA about a pig and how some can be treated in the pork industry, very unfortunately so. But then the pig started talking, which caught me off guard, and she sounded like a young kid. She talked about how it was hard to stand, as it really hurt to do so, as well as a few other things. After she says her babies were being taken away, some caption comes up saying that, according to studies at the time of that airing, pigs had the mental intelligence equal to a 3 year old child. And something else that involved the pork industry being better regulated for the safety of both us and the pigs.
I think the psa that screwed me up was this one where these adults were in animal costumes (it looked like a kids show) and the guy in the bear costume started 🍇 the girl in the cat costume. Edit: Im only on tier 2 so it might be in there
1:52:03 I'll add a little bit here. This PSA was created in 2004 and the image shown is one of their print ads. One of four, might I add. They've also done more radio ads (and tv ads, too!) but they are not of the fear level of "Laughter" (the name of the PSA that Zach was talking about).
Not sure if this PSA was mentioned, but Rewind the Future is a disturbing one. It shows an obese man's unhealthy choices as a child leading to him suffering a heart attack at the age of 32. The PSA was aimed at parents to have them stop feeding their kids junk food. And I got another one that I didn't see on the Iceberg-Buy a Puppy Safely. It's from a point of view of a male Dachshund puppy, who came from a puppy farm, and he says that he would die in a week because of his sickness. This PSA is a warning about buying a puppy from a shady ad and if the seller doesn't have the mom present (Or a fake mom is present instead) or the paperwork about the puppy, the would be buyer has to walk away, as the puppy would likely come from a puppy farm.
If you ever make a new version of this, here's one: In Germany, there's a series of PSAs that just about everyone in my age group has seen. They were made by the Federal Association for Literacy and Basic Education (Bundesverband Alphabetisierung und Grundbildung), and they're directed at illiterate adults. They all depict some situation that arises from one of the people in the ad being unable to read, like, say, some sort of accident at work resulting from ignoring a warning sign (the contents of which the worker couldn't read), or a child asking their grandmother to read a story to them, just to realize that their grandmother can't read. The most famous one is probably this one: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ZLXs3elJFOU.html That particular one shows a collapsed shelf with a sign reading out "Beladen Verboten!" (Translating to "Loading Prohibited!") and on the ground, we can see what appears to be smudges of paint from containers that fell off of the shelf that collapsed because the sign was ignored. We then see a dazzled worker, who is the one who loaded the shelf and caused it to collapse in the first place. Then enters his supervisor, who is understandably very angry at him for what just happened. He starts shouting at him about how there's a sign literally telling him not to load that part of the shelf, and asking him if he needs to make the sign even bigger, of if he just can't read. Another employee then comes in and says "Sir, this man can't read." The supervisor is shocked at himself for never noticing this all those years, and a text appears reading "Over 4 million people in Germany cannot read and write properly" as, for obvious reasons, the narrator is also reading out, followed by the words: "We can help." as a phone number is shown on screen, and the narrator continues with the line "Don't write yourself off. Learn to read and write." These are pretty famous here in Germany, and i think they'd fit your iceberg pretty well, seeing how most of the PSAs on it are from the anglosphere.
I don't ever really remember seeing PSA's growing up, but I remember some details from this video I saw when I was younger. I was about 5 or 6 so my memory of it is faint. It seems like it was a group of teenagers and I think they were drinking or something like that and it said something about some students don't make it to graduation. It would be at the end of some movies/dvds I would watch as a kid. I might be misrembering it but it would have been around 2014 or 2015. Does anyone else remember this?
To be fair for Australia their roads are crazy. 😂 insane intersections I’m from Jersey USA and we have jug handles and round abouts so they’re weird too 😂
The psa that always stuck with me i don't even remember what it was about but there was a little girl with a teddy bear and red paint then you see the bear fall covered in the red paint
Yeah honestly. RU-vid has just made it harder and harder to stay monetized or even not get age restricted over the years and it really does suck but I try to get away with what I can
@@Zach.R friend i cant afford to pay anything but i love your content ant i will always support creepy stuff on youtube. never stop what you are doing because there will always be people who support what you do.
@@alistertowelie I appreciate that so much! Even just having people watch my content is amazing and hey the more people watching and supporting the content the higher the chance of me going full time with this is :) No one has to pay for my Patreon or RU-vid memberships (as much as it is really appreciated) I just appreciate people watching and enjoying my content so much!
I know it's been a year but for anyone else who doesn't know, the song being sung in the psa at 22:50 is "All Things Bright and Beautiful" which is a Christian hymn fairly well known (at least I know it's well known in the UK). The hymn is basically about how God created all of the beautiful plants and creatures but in the psa they've changed the final lyric from "the lord God made them all" to "oh god we've killed them all" as the psa is about global warming/ carbon emissions. The melody is also commonly used in other psas, particularly ones from the RSPCA (both uk and Australia).
I brand there was once a real common PSA about fat and it showed the inside of a stomach or something with a gross yellowish fat thing that was really puke level gross but the worst thing was it's common airing time was normally AROUND DINNER TIME FOR ME AND MY FAMILY so I lost appetite extremely easy... Forget about eating to much fat and now worry about the amount of food you eat... Btw: the word suggestions, suggested the word "ugly" after "fat and" and I've never think I've wrote something to suggest those words together...
just so you know, one italian psa is actually pretty infamous in the psa community (basically is always in the top 3 most trending psas in the pif wiki
I remember when I was in school, I was playing cool math games in the school computer labs, and I was watching an ad waiting to play my game. The ad was little lungs in the great big world and I was rlly scared of it for a long time
Great video man. However I lost it at the Crash Test Dummies entry when you said it's the one video. The video that you've talked about so many times before. I dunno, like that that was the thing you found notable just made me laugh.
19:43 i feel like there was a series of child (i think) animations in this artstyle and it was also about a man and he had crazy adventures i think, does anybody know it?
39:42 just in case you didn't know or don't recognize him (you can Google it if you don't believe me), the actor offering the gun to the girl for the Russian roulette is Russell Crowe.
Glad to see you back in full force brother 🫡 can’t wait to see more content from you! (Wish the Lou al bano and Bryan Cranston psa’s were on here but still an amazing video ✌️)
Honestly, the Vince and Larry dummies would make for a weird Adult Swim-style show! I mean the merch alone would be a hit. (pun intended, maybe...?) But I know I'm not the only one who immediately thought about Ukraine after that Save the Children Syria one in the first tier.
To be fair most animation is outsourced. India and South Korea are the ones producing most of the animation in the world. The those standards rakin bass Christmas specials is technically anime but most anime is actually korean.
Is this just me or-do any pet/dog related PSA or shows with like a message that makes me just cry-its mostly just me and my mom tho but your videos are great u should do a collab with @tuv
