Hold on to your Smurf...

UNICEF has had a lot of great ideas. One that sticks clearly in my mind is "trick or treat for UNICEF." If you don't remember, the concept was pretty simple: after you had finished begging you neighbors for candy, you would hold up a little orange box and ask them to kick in some spare change for underprivileged kids across the globe. This almost never turned into cash money for kids to go out and buy still more candy.
Picking Danny Kaye to be the world's goodwill ambassador to children was a great idea. After Danny passed away, Audrey Hepburn was a worthy successor until her untimely death in 1993. The fact that UNICEF hasn't seen fit to name one single goodwill ambassador since may be indicative of the problem that surfaced this week. Belgian TV has begun broadcasting commercials produced by UNICEF picturing Smurfs and their village are seen being bombed by airplanes. You remember Smurfs - little blue characters with white hats and pants, supremely optimistic?
The video is peacefully introduced by birds, butterflies and happy Smurfs playing and singing their theme song when suddenly out of the sky, bombs rain down onto their forest village, scattering Papa Smurf and the rest as their houses are set ablaze. The bombs kill Smurfette leaving Baby Smurf orphaned and crying at the edge of a crater in the last scene of the video and finishing of with the text "don't let war destroy the children's world."
Get it?
Well, I confess that I never had much love in my life for Smurfs. For a while when I was in college I had a stuffed Smurf that we ritually abused at the start of every trip in my car. The Death Smurf suffered greatly, and as I reflect back I know that the little blue guy never did anything to deserve having his head slammed (repeatedly) in the door, or his nose burned by the cigarette lighter. It was unfortunate for Death Smurf that he ended up in a college kid's Volkswagen bug.
Still, that was one Smurf. I was not annihilating the entire blue race. To what end? Belgians are never going let war destroy their little mushroom houses and dismember them just for effect. Smurfs are part of the pop culture firmament there. How would they feel about the Snuggles bear catching some shrapnel? Or the Rugrats losing limbs to some poorly placed land mines? Nope - it has to be Smurfs. It just wouldn't be as tragic. "We see so many images that we don't really react anymore," said Julie Lamoureux, account director at Publicis, an advertising agency that drew up the campaign for UNICEF Belgium. "In 35 seconds we wanted to show adults how awful war is by reaching them within their memories of childhood."
Well, I guess if they're looking to expand the campaign to America, I can always suggest Strawberry Shortcake.