I love old PSAs and sex education films from the ’30′s through the ’70s. Most of what you see is so outdated, and was so outrageous to begin with, that they are hilariously funny and/or parody themselves without any further help. There’s a ton of this stuff out there on archive.org, and a good portion of it is either public domain or under creative commons license. Expect to see a lot of mashups from me using this type of stuff as source material in days to come.
Anyway, with all the action surrounding Herman Cain, and his alleged dalliances and denials regarding same, as well as all of the other politicians and would-be leaders of our country who have been caught with their pants down over the years, I started thinking about the absolutely outrageous Ad Council PSA from the ’70s, a music video called “VD is for Everybody.” The result is the attached mashup.
Now, keep in mind that sexual dalliances are non-partisan, so I’ve tried to provide an equal number of offenders from both of our major political parties…The message here is not partisan, the message is that there are a lot of scheming, lying, hypocritical politicians out there, and that’s about it. The sad fact that these guys maintain a pretense of moral superiority while being anything but morally superior, and demand far higher standards from we, the governed, than they hold themselves to in their own lives is the true comedy (or tragedy) here.
Also, the intro is by the late, great, SoCal Newsman, George Putnum, from another film called “Pervsion for Profit”, a McCarthy-era piece of scare propaganda that connected the pornography industry with the “Red Menace”. It’s been cut down, re-mixed, and parodied all over YouTube, and is worth watching just to recall the madness of the McCarthy Era, and get a read on just how close we are to being manipulated by similar propaganda tactics today.
There were a couple of fun aspects to the actual editing of this piece, including using Magic Bullet Misfire to make all the recent footage fit in with the scratched, faded, and flickering look of the original film. I used about 3-4 different plugins for each of the clips, and the results are pretty powerful, given the simplicity of using the tools. Check out Red Giant Software’s page if you’re looking for cool plugins for editing effects.
For those who aren’t big on politics, the folks in the video are:
President William Jefferson Clinton
Former Presidential Candidate Herman Cain
Former Representative Anthony Wiener
Former Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer
Former Nevada Senator John Ensign
Former Senator, and Vice Presidential/Presidential Candidate,John Edwards
Feel free to look up their specific dalliances, if you’re not familiar, they are all pretty shameful.
Anyway, enjoy!