Oops! I haven’t written anything for over a week. I’m feelin’ like a criminal. Been super busy with work, which is good for the overall pie chart but bad for the X-E slice’s percentage. Next week looks to be pretty horrendously busy as well, but after that, I’m virtually clear and can live like an unemployed slug once more.
Tonight, I toss aside any prep work I should be doing for tomorrow to tell you about one of my favorite public service announcements in history: The one where drunk drivers turn into skeletons.
Good Christ. The infamous PSA debuted in 1983 and has remained picture-perfectly burned into my soul for over twenty years. After seeing it again recently, I couldn’t believe that it was exactly as I’d remembered, right down to the flash frames and oddball effects. This isn’t a testament to my memory powers, but rather how effective the spot was.
The PSA kicks off with a very hip and eclectic group of ’80s teens, rocking out to Michael Jackson’s latest hit outside of a local club. (Or a dive bar, or a convenience mart — I was never really sure.) A party-crazy jock and his wild girlfriend lead the night, while party-crazy jock’s less–crazy friend tries to convince his concerned and moody girlfriend to stay out late and hit up a new scene. She just wants to go home, especially when the aforementioned party-crazy pals decide to bring beer into the car with reckless abandon.
It’s literal drinking and driving, folks. This isn’t a case where you get drunk and make the poor choice to drive afterwards…they’re actually drinking while driving. It’s a little hammer-over-the-head as far as sociopolitical plot points go, but when you’ve only got thirty seconds to get a message across, exaggerations help. Besides, if the teens didn’t decide to do their drinking in the car, this spot wouldn’t have been so effective. Here’s why:
With a beer in hand, party-crazy jock puts his key in the ignition, and WHAM! A white flash, and they’re all a bunch of spooky dead skeletons! Cue voiceover: “If you don’t stop your friend from drinking and driving…you’re as good as dead.” AHHHHHHHHH
I mean, holy shit. I was four-years-old when this thing aired. It scared me beyond belief, but probably not in the way that the PSA’s creators intended. See, I was too young to connect the “beer” portion of the equation to the “dead” part of the equation, nor was I worldly enough to understand that the visuals were metaphorical. For as effective and frightening as this all was, I took home a wholly inappropriate lesson from it:
Drinking in the car…drinking anything in the car…would cause a person to immediately transform into a dead skeleton.
That’s what I believed. I honestly and sincerely believed that bringing any sort of beverage into any sort of automobile was an open invitation for ominous thunderclaps and subsequent skin removal. One night, I was out with my parents somewhere, and they wanted to grab a quick bite in the car before getting back on the road. As my mother approached the passenger side door with a neatly organized fast food tray, I spotted the most horrible sight a kid with these beliefs could see: Three paper cups filled with Coca-Cola.
I freaked out. I really freaked out. I kicked and screamed and cried and just went totally batshit until they let me have my way. We ate outside the car that night, using the trunk as a table. They tried to explain that what I saw on television wasn’t a literal interpretation, and that Coca-Cola wasn’t the same as alcohol. I didn’t care. Hell, I didn’t even know what the word “literal” meant. All I knew was that there was no fucking way I was going to let myself turn into bones just so I could drink a goddamned Coke in the goddamned car. Nooooo freakin’ way.
I can’t remember when I got over it, but eventually, I did. I realize how ridiculous it was to believe such a thing, but if you’ll watch the PSA and try to keep a child’s perspective in mind, I don’t think it’s such a stretch that I did.
I grew up in the midst of the years-spanning “Just Say No” campaign, which started out as an anti-drug thing but ultimately branched off into other areas. Though the campaign was often criticized for whittling society’s problems down to something “too simplistic,” they were damned effective when targeted at small kids. Hey, if I’m five-years-old and you tell me that drugs will make me see green monsters and jump out of high windows to avoid them, I’m going to believe it. I think this skeleton-pumped PSA perfectly reflects that era’s methods of keeping children away from bad things: Exaggerate until they shit themselves straight.
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I hear you on the stuck at home thing though. Right now I’m sick with what I’m pretty sure is mono (I seem to come down with it every few years). We can be miserable shut-ins together!
Ugh, I remember this. While it didn’t make me afraid to eat in the car, it certainly gave me some unpleasant dreams for a few days.
But then again, I’ve always been a sensitive kid. I still can remember freaking out at the original HBO version of “Sweedney Todd” with Angela Landsbury when I was about six, and the Disney wartime short version of “Chicken Little” scared me so much around the same time, I wouldn’t watch it and ended up with a school nurse telling me how fake it all was and how it shouldn’t bother me.