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  Look, January 8, 1957 . Since 1942, the Ad Council has presented Americans with public service announcements ranging from Smokey the Bear's suggestion that only you can prevent forest fires to McGruff the Crime Dog's vow to take a bite out of crime .  This two-page spread highlights some of the Ad Council's late 1950s campaigns, which reflect a mixture of optimism, community building, and Cold War initiatives. It is refreshing to note that the Ad Council's website does apologize for some of its too-jingoistic campaigns during the Second World War directed against certain "foreigners."  Perhaps a new campaign resurrecting the hand gesture depicted in question #3 could be modernized and used extensively for the upcoming U.S. midterms. 

Our Army at War #166, April 1966. This is a revamped and expanded version of a post I originally wrote in 2010.  Are you ready to compare your degrees of tolerance towards cabbages, foreigners and pulp fiction?  Given when this was published (early February 1966), I'd be curious to see how the like/dislike portion would have been filled in areas at the heart of the civil rights movement—what would a kid in New York City's response have been like compared to one from Alabama? This quiz to test your levels of prejudice was one of a long-running series of public service announcements from the National Social Welfare Assembly that were published in various DC comics between 1949 and 1967.  Action Comics #251, April 1959. This ad, which originally ran in 1959, was written by editor Jack Schiff (who championed fillers like this to prove comics could be a constructive influence on 1950s youth) and drawn by Bernard Baily (the original artist of  the Spectre , a hero ...

Part of a series of spots from the mid-1970s, around the time Canada began its switch to metric measurement. Can't say that this message made an impression in the Windsor area during my childhood - apart from the local CBC television station, everyone continued to measure snow in inches and feet. Even now, I still convert to the old system in my mind whenever I listen to the weather.

Labatt's probably had good intentions in providing the public with tips on becoming a better driver. I know I would have lined up to try their fancy mobile testing unit at the CNE or any country fair. A crucial element of being a better motorist is missing, one that the brewer might not have wanted to publicize for fear of lost sales: drinking and driving.

Because the only way to teach American children of the late 1970s/early 1980s about good dental exercise is to employ a Fonzie wannabe. Speaking of Fonzie, while researching a recent Torontoist piece on the early days of CityPulse , I stumbled upon this picture in the Toronto Sun from the episode of Happy Days that inspired the expression "jump the shark" ( Wikipedia has a cleaner version of this picture ). Photo originally published in the September 1, 1977 edition of the Toronto Sun . - JB

Ever have an image or commercial burned in your brain for years and never found a way to prove that your mind isn't playing tricks on you? Until some random browsing on YouTube this weekend, I was almost convinced that Duke the Penguin was a figment of my imagination. Blame Toledo, Ohio for this brainworm. My suspicion is that I was waiting for other family members to finish trying on clothes at the Woodville Mall branch of Sears and watched a loop tape of a Duke ad several times to kill time. Five minutes is all I needed for this cool-lookin' dude to forever etch himself on my brain cells. These memories surface whenever I see the "Poochie" episode of The Simpsons , as Poochie and Duke share similar delusions of being "cool". Stevie Wonder utilizes a tune from the soundtrack of The Woman in Red for the public good. Lingering impression from childhood viewings: all the "no"s. Perhaps the drunk driver was driven to overindulgence that ...