Your Tax Dollar At Work--Pip The Magic Safety Elephant!

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...