PSA Pathos, Day 5
In 1985, the Ad Council produced a well-known series of PSAs featuring 2 crash dummies: testing facility veteran Vince and apprentice Larry. The PSAs often featured witty banter, visual puns, and amusing injuries that the pair of dummies sustained during crash tests.
Despite losing their body parts, having dents on them, or having clothing ripped, they'd still crack jokes, making their dangerous situations entertaining rather than traumatic. The campaign's famous tagline, "You could learn a lot from a dummy. Buckle your safety belt," employed wordplay to suggest that viewers would be foolish not to wear seatbelts.
Take, for example, this 1992 PSA.
I have to agree with luigihorror6455, who said, "Vince and Larry predicted the GoPro cam."
The tone was consistently lighthearted and comedic, as demonstrated in the PSA above. This approach deliberately avoided the "sense of fear and tragedy that were the stock in trade of most road safety messages."
Road Safety Scotland's 2022 PIF, however, used the polar opposite.
Instead of the camera being mounted on a head, breaking the brick wall, rattling across a highway, skittering up a tree, and smashing a billboard, the camera instead pans to the victim's widow and daughter's funeral dresses laid out on a bed, emphasizing the preparation for mourning and the permanence of loss.
Instead of tape squirting out of Vince's Dummy cam, the bereaved crash test dummies sit at a dinner table with an empty seat poignantly left for their lost family member.
This campaign was launched in response to concerning statistics showing that 13% of those killed on Scotland's roads over the previous five years were not wearing seatbelts, with nearly one in ten drivers admitting to "always driving" without one.
Both approaches achieved remarkable success within their respective contexts. The Vince and Larry campaign is credited with helping increase American seatbelt usage from 21% in 1984 to over 90% by 2019, potentially saving over 85,000 lives. The characters became so popular they spawned action figures and were eventually inducted into the Smithsonian Institution.
The Scottish campaign, while more recent, addresses a specific problem: research showed that drivers perceived not wearing seatbelts as less risky than other dangerous behaviors like drink-driving or speeding, with only 75% considering it "very serious" compared to 93% for drunk driving. The emotional weight of showing bereaved families aimed to reframe seatbelt use as a family responsibility rather than just personal safety.
Imagine if Vince and Larry were resurrected - or rather, reconstructed. Would they maintain the slapstick comedy or would they end up in caskets?