This is just sick. Maybe they’ll blow up Snoopy next.
Smurfette is left for dead. Baby Smurf is left crying and orphaned as the Smurf’s village is carpet bombed by warplanes — a horrific scene and imagery not normally associated with the lovable blue-skinned cartoon characters.
These are the scenes being shown as part of a new UNICEF ad-campaign on Belgian television.
“It’s working. We are getting a lot of reactions and people are logging on to our Web site,” UNICEF Belgium spokesman Philippe Henon said Tuesday.
It’s all about ratings apparently.
No, what’s sick is that this sort of thing happens in real life, and people do nothing about it.
Has anybody got a link for this? I hope people will be shocked and offended at this, and will then continue to, um, support our president in a time of war.
It’s more about awareness than ratings. UNICEF requested more graphic ads including much blue blood and dismembered Smurfs. The cartoons owners refused this request.
What are they advertising here?
Blowing up smurfs can only be a good thing.
The ad rips off the great The Parking Lot is Full comic all the way back from 1999! It couldn’t be a coincidence!
http://plif.andkon.com/archive/wc199.gif
Umm, what exactly is the point of this? Nobody uses carpet-bombing as a legitimate tactic in warfare anymore. Nevertheless, I doubt too many people complained much that we were employing this tactic to destroy the German war machine during WWII (except the Germans I suppose).
Maybe a more gripping (and less silly) image to show would be all the additional people dying from AIDS in Africa because the UN and the WHO chooses to carry-out innoculation programs while casting aside basic santiary precautions like using clean needles.
Lemme see…Sally Struthers is a stock joke even though she shows real human children and international outrage is muffled to nonexistent. Bombing cartoon characters gets J. C. Dvorak’s condemnation, “this is just sick”.
Dvorak, I generally enjoy and approve of your comments. In this case, you seem to miss the point. Cartoon outrage over real dead children? this is just sick.
Gargamel’s packing heat
The reason Sally Struthers is a stock joke has nothing to do with suffering children. The reason is that she had sunk so low that it was the only job she could get. Americans love when the successful fail. It makes us feel better about our failures.
Plus the fact she got fat. A skinny person getting real fat is always funny. Once again, it makes us feel better for being fat too.
So, we’re not really laughing at Miss Struthers, we’re laughing at our pitiful selves.
The US military goes to great lenghts, and at great expense, to only hit the buildings and complexes they are specifically targeting. And while nothing goes perfectly in waging war, it is a far cry from depicting the entire smurf village in flames with bomb falling out of the sky. So again I ask – what is the point of this?
Where do you get that statistic, Chris Jennings? Could you provide a link?
Mike: The point is to show the lives of war affected children not to protest carpet bombing. While the details may differ, children all over the world are affected by conflicts of varying types. From children who saw their entire families hacked up by machetes in Rwanda, to children who had their limbs blown off by land mines in Cambodia, to children in Darfur whose school was bombed in broad daylight by the Sudanese government, etc, etc. The slogan at the end of the ad is “Don’t Let War Affect Children” and the campaign is to raise funds for former child soliders in Burundi (a former Belgian Colony that they royally screwed up before leaving, but I digress). The point is not carpet bombing, it’s war in general.
As to bombs in the Gulf war: 250 000 bombs were dropped on Iraq. Of these 244 were smart bombs and 88 were cruise missles. The rest were guided only by gravity.
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/gulf.war/legacy/airstrikes/
“The US military goes to great lenghts, and at great expense, to only hit the buildings and complexes they are specifically targeting.”
http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,FL_australia_081305,00.html
The Bad News is that idoit brainy smurf is alive and is suing our government for pain and suffing.