I come from the golden age of anti-drug propaganda. I could not get through my Saturday morning cartoons without watching hottie-hot-hot Rachel Leigh Cook destroy a kitchen at least once. Also, there was something called Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue, because nothing says anti-drug more than anthropomorphic animals, little blue people, and ALF.
Even with all of the bizarre, potentially drug-inspired anti-drug propaganda of my 1990s youth, even I will admit that the single greatest anti-drug propaganda video came out during the Age of Aquarius. While hippies were advocating peace and love at jam band festivals and All-American men were flipping off the Russians from the surface of the moon, Lockheed Aircraft Corporation devoted some of its budget to making this hilariously bad anti-drug propaganda video.
The production is of shoddy quality. Lockheed was too busy making planes to drop bombs on Vietnamese villages to worry about finding a good production staff.
During the anti-drug video, entitled Case Study: LSD, a woman recalls a time when she was “jacked up on marijuana,” because apparently in the 1960s, getting “jacked up” did not have the same meaning it does today.
While “jacked up on marijuana,” the woman is offered some LSD, or acid, by one of the other apartment-dwelling hippie stoners of stereotypical depiction. Because she is “jacked up on marijuana,” the woman accepts the acid, because as we all know, marijuana is the real gateway drug, not the rampant alcohol consumption of the 1960s.
It’s not like this beautiful piece of anti-drug propaganda goes off the rails immediately. After all, the narrator expects an instant effect, but like almost all drugs, it doesn’t hit immediately. The narrator decides after waiting for a bit to go change her clothes, putting on pink capris and a green and brown blouse.
Did the acid affect her decision to put on those clothes? The propaganda doesn’t specify, but she said she “thought the colors were beautiful,” so perhaps.
This is where things get good, and by good I mean breaks through the barriers of sense-making and kicks realism in the balls.
Look, I’ve dropped acid many times. I love it. I know a lot of people who have dropped acid many times. They love it, too. No one to whom with I’ve ever had a conversation about acid ever had an experience like the one this woman is about to describe.
I’m not saying it couldn’t happen. These are mind-altering substances, after all. I’m merely prefacing that the following content is probably unrealistic, even by LSD’s standards.
The narrator and her hippie friend head down to Market Street to buy a hot dog, because munchies. After about ten seconds of still images, psychedelic effects, creepy music, and creepier facial expressions, she explains that she was hungry and dressed her hot dog in mustard, ketchup, and relish, because marijuana.
But suddenly, as she’s putting the hot dog to her mouth, she hears a scream. Confused, she asks her friend, Terry, if he heard it. He did not. She puts the hot dog back up to her mouth, then hears the screaming again. She looks down and sees the source.
If the visual representation of this alleged event is to be taken seriously, the narrator saw a Treasure Troll in the bun of her hot dog. But let’s give her the benefit of the doubt and believe there was just a face on the frankfurter. The hot dog tells the tripping woman that she cannot eat him, for he has a wife and seven kids at home to support.
The narrator tries to convince Terry that the hot dog is alive, which he scoffs because things like that don’t happen on acid. But because Terry’s skepticism makes for a story that won’t scare white suburban parents everywhere, suddenly Terry joins her trip and sees it too.
The narrator comes to the conclusion she is hallucinating and takes a bite of the hot dog, causing it to “scream so loud that you could hear it all around town.”
She throws the hot dog on the ground and jumps on it. After another thirteen seconds of thunderous, ominous music, stock sound effects of screams, pictures of her shoes standing on her snack, and another image of the woman screaming synced with the sound effects, the narrator “realized that [she] had murdered it,” because, according to the fine folks at Lockheed, murdering tubes of a reject meat is what people do on acid.
And I thought the anti-drug propaganda videos from my youth were bad.
I know what some of you are thinking: “This is ridiculous, Robert! There’s no way this video is that bad. You must be smoking the wacky tobacky!”
Watch for yourself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cSxbAKgjH8
Featured image is a screenshot from YouTube.
(HT Raw Story)