So, the Arizona Meth Project decided to go ahead and enlist Darren Aronofsky to direct some public service announcements declaring that meth is bad, despite the evidence that Breaking Bad continually presents to the opposite. If you're curious to see what the director of Requiem For A Dream, still one of the best examples of why you should stay away from hard drugs ever to be committed to the screen, has to do to actually get a PSA to air on American TV, here's your answer:
If you're not an American reader of the site, then I can only imagine your puzzlement at these ads. Yes, meth is bad, but American commercials, even anti-substance PSAs, are so hilariously neutral in what they can actually show on screen that they wind up being fairly inert. At least compared to other country's PSAs. I present to you this Canadian workplace safety PSA, one of five that are arguably not safe for life if you dislike horrible things happening to nice pretty ladies:
Or hell, check out this Welsh PSA on texting and driving:
I'll leave it up to you to decide whether or not a broseph screaming at his kid brother or seeing four teenage girls bounced around the inside of their car like corpses in Half-Life 2 is more effective. I think we all know which one's more entertaining, though.
I am deeply proud to be Canadian on this day, those American ads are pretty tame
Shit these commercials are DEPRESSING! The last one is horribly cheesy during the accident, it would have been more effective if they just showed the car getting hit, and not the girls flailing around while hearing these horrible crunching sound effects.
Also the "Dig deeper into meth" section of this page is great
This is my favourite PSA!
That English one was actually an entire TV show. It was like 30 minutes long and they showed it to us all in school just as most of us were turning 16 (as we leave at 16, so they can't show it at 17 which is the legal driving age here.)
It's awful. It goes into the whole back stories of the girls and one of them is pregnant and the other is having man trouble and then two of them die and the other one is left in the aftermath with everyone blaming her for the accident and what not. It's tragic but it's so poorly made that it had almost no emotional punch at all.
Why can't science make house hippos real?
What else is happening? Sweating blue fluid out of your skin? If TV has learned me anything, a former science teacher and a deadbeat kid are taking out meth hotspots one by one, just wait it out.
@dubios451 said:
Me too. Us canadians know how to scare the shit out of people.
The anti-drug ones are pretty good too. The new ones with the girl going crazy is good.
if you live in Canada you know what I'm talking about
That Welsh one is amazing. Most of the road ads in the UK are similarly violent; who doesn't want to see little dead girls in the middle of the day?
Not exactly a Drug PSA, but my god is this depressing. It's made even worse with the Dead Island theme attatched to it.
@cexantus said:
Fuck, man.. that killed me
@cexantus: That is 3 minutes of pure sadness. I just want to crawl into a ball and cry.
Australia has/had a very similar work place safety ad as the Canadian one expect is ours you get to see a face melt.
@cexantus said:
Almost made me tear up at work, man. Not cool. ;<
@cexantus: son of a bitch.
Canadian PSA's are pretty insane compared to ours here in the States. This one comes immediately to mind.
@RecSpec: I totally forgot about that ad.
Damn, we make some effective ad's up here in the north
Deliberately leaving out the most shocking of the bunch kind of takes the punch out of this article, but even this one backs off a bit.
@Red12b: Dude, I think you just broke the page with whatever you were trying to post. I'm getting sent straight to the YouTube homepage whenever I load this one.
@wrathofconn:Same. Luckily this jumped to page two so I could actually access it.