Post apocalyptic kindergarteners

October 31, 2008 5:55 PM

Help me find this video of five year olds living in a world without adults.

I'm not sure exactly when I saw this PSA, but it predates Youtube. 2004 maybe? The video was short and showed small kids in an abandoned city, possibly New York. They were brushing each other's hair, washing in the river and looking after each other. There were some dogs running around, but no people apart from the pre-schoolers.

At the end a voice-over said "AIDS has created millions of orphans in Africa. That's the equivalent of every child under the age of five in the United States... with no-one to look after them."

Somebody else's Ask Me has reminded me of this vid, which I can't seem to find anywhere.

Also there was music in the background which went La-la, la-la, LA-la. La-la, la-la, LA-la.

Any suggestions?

posted by the latin mouse to computers & internet (4 comments total)

I've been looking for this one for a long time, actually - it was put out by Doctors without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and I saw it on television in Paris in the summer of 2003. Maybe someone with better google-fu than I can take that info and find a copy, but I've never been able to.
posted by fuzzbean at 6:07 PM on October 31, 2008

Actually, this ad was produced for the UN Foundation/The Ad Council by the great Leo Burnett Company. The campaign was to raise awareness of all the orphans left due to AIDS. You could be speaking of "Kids" or "Under Five"....They both won awards.

Go to the very bottom of this page for the script and screenshots of the one I bet you're thinking of.

You can see the ad at the very beginning of the 2003 Public Service CLIO reel by going to my drop site where I have uploaded the .RM file that will grab the spot for you. Unfortunately, it's only available in RealMedia format (get RealAlternative instead of RealPlayer if that bothers you).

I put the link here.

Just click on the the file "clio_03.rm"

Like I said, it's the first spot on a 10 minute reel. There are other great public service spots that follow that. Oh....the spot is also the original, made-for-late-night, 90-second version narrated by Michael Douglas.

Great public service spot - no doubt about it.
posted by Gerard Sorme at 8:23 PM on October 31, 2008

Whoa - thanks, Gerard! You mentioned that this was the original 90-second version - were there others made? I *swear* in the version I saw it was a female vocalist, but a bunch of the images are definitely the same.
posted by fuzzbean at 10:46 PM on October 31, 2008

Yes, there was a :30 and a :90. The thirty second spot ("Kids") was not used very often - though, it too, won an award. It was very similar with quicker cuts and still only used the Bobby McFerrin tune and had only a very quick voiceover. The one interesting thing about "Kids" was the fact it was used in a multi cable property "roadblock" (it ran at the exact same time on many channels). Amazingly, I just looked that up and found an article about that special evening.

I don't know what the version is you might have seen with a female vocalist - of course we are talking Bobby McFerrin here(!) who could easily have been mistaken for a female. This campaign was a Leo Burnett concept and produced by some very good people from @radical.media.
posted by Gerard Sorme at 12:24 AM on November 1, 2008