It's always a mystery why
some government PSA carton characters--like
Smokey Bear or
McGruff The Crime Dog--catch on, while others vanish forever into obscurity.
Then again, maybe it's
not so hard to figure out sometimes...
Yes,
Pip The Magic Safety Elephant was a real creation of the U.S. government!
So how did Pip get to be the "
Magic Safety Elephant"? Well, at first he started out as a
dumbass, like all of us:
OK, so Pip is
not a magical pachyderm that I'd want to trust my kids to, at least not yet...
So far,
every single animal in the world is better at safety than Pip!!
How, then, did he become magical and get the safety gig? Well, they kind of
gloss over that point:
"
Other similar episodes occurred"?!? Dude, you should be dead 10 times over, and
you're lecturing
us about safety?
Plus, you just
became magic? How?
Most of Pip's duties seem to involve lazing around letting others carry the load...
And, well, he's sometimes shocking poor at prioritizing:
Johnny's been eating lead paint flakes in his "
inner city home" for months. Yet...
He had been eating paint
FOR MONTHS, Pip. What the hell?
Anyway, yeah, Pip dispenses all the usual good advices about old medicine and household cleaners and storing chemicals and locking sheds...
Maybe it was terrible costume design...maybe it was anti-elephant prejudice. Maybe it was the fact that he was a dumbass who wasn't very good at his job. But for whatever reason, Pip vanished into the mists of time, while McGruff and Smokey are still big players on the celebrity animal safety circuit...
