That's Not Very Smurfy

Back in the day, during October UNICEF would run their "Trick or Treat for UNICEF" commercials.  The spots would show kids dressed up in their Halloween costumes, going door-to-door trick-or-treating.  But instead of wanting candy, the kids would hold up little cardboard box banks and say "Trick or Treat for UNICEF" and the adults answering the doors would put money in the kids' little banks and everybody would be smiling and happy.

In Belgium, UNICEF's new ad campaign addresses the issue of the child-soldiers in Africa.  The 20-second video commercial shows that war can happen in the most innocent of places - in this case, the village where the Smurfs live.  Yes, you heard me correctly - in this commercial, the Smurfs are bombed.  The commercial starts out with the Smurfs holding hands in a circle, and they're singing and dancing around a big campfire.  Suddenly, bombs start dropping and the Smurf village, and the Smurfs, are anihilated.  The most disturbing scene shows Smurfette dead on the ground, with one of her little white high-heeled shoes blown off, and Baby Smurf sitting on the ground by Smurfette's lifeless body, crying.  The commercial ends with the words "Don't let war destroy the children's world."

I agree with UNICEF's justification for using a shocking ad campaing like this - a UNICEF spokesperson said "We see so many images that we don't really react anymore.  In half a minute we wanted to show adults how awful war is by reaching them within their memories of childhood."  I totally agree.  We've become desensitized and hardened by what we see today.  Take the "Feed The Children" commercials, for example.  When they first started airing on TV, we were touched, saddened, and even angry at what we saw - how could children be living like that? Now when one of those commercials is on, we just change the channel on the remote control so we're not bothered by the scenes of the starving children.  I went a page on the MSN site, and watched the Smurf commercial.  It was bizarre.  I can see why kids would be disturbed watching it - I'm glad that the Belgium TV stations aren't showing the commercial until later at night.  All I could think of was when I was in my late teens, how it was the cool thing to collect the little plastic/rubber Smurf figures.  I bet I had over a hundred of them.  I'm sure there's some twisted people that have already gotten some of those little Smurf figurines and filmed their own version of the UNICEF commercial.  And I'm sure if I looked hard enough, I could probably find their home movies on the internet.