these PSAs are so cute i wish canada was real

honestly getting jumpscared by: “guy gets buttcrack surgically removed because he’s scared of any kind of crack now” is funnier than any sketch that could’ve been made from that lol

My wife was so enamored with the concept of little house hippos that I bought a few dozen little plastic hippos at a toy shop and hid them around the house. Peeking from behind books, on top of shelves, from under the dresser. For about two weeks I got to hear a little shriek of delight every time she found one.

Kurtis hating himself for literally being a literal child with an imagination is top tier

As a previous little girl, I can say I spent most of my time acting out the most dramatic stories I could dream up with my Barbie/American girl dolls. Death, injury, crazy storms, heartbreak, etc. I also like pretending I had to survive in the wilderness in the backyard

Not Canadian, but I remember a PSA in an assembly where a girl named Crystal went to every kid in the neighborhood and asked if they wanted to play and every kid slammed the door in her face and I remember feeling SO BAD for her. Then the video revealed that her full name was crystal meth and you should never play with crystal meth. I don’t. I don’t why they thought getting a bunch of 9 year olds to sympathize with crystal meth was a good idea.

Kurtis thinking he got a private michael jackson concert everyday is the funniest shit

I almost cried when Kurtis said that he believed Michael Jackson would stay in the TV and perform "Will You Be There" for him and him only whenever he'd watch Free Willy as a kid, that's literally the funniest shit I've ever heard

The ones that really scared me were the "The Real Cost" lung cancer ones. Those little lungs in a great big world freakin' scared me.

i genuinely remember being a child and watching hannah montana being like “yknow if she wanted to keep such a big secret you’d think she wouldn’t make a tv show about it”

The moral: Every character in a Kurtis sketch is allergic to peanuts until proven otherwise.

You should check out the British psa's from the early 2000's. They were like short horror movies, very graphic deaths. There was one about a little girl that gets hit by a car, it's about reducing speed and it sort of rewinds time and all her bones unbreak. It's really haunted me since I saw it as a kid...

when i would watch sitcoms as a kid, i remember thinking that wherever the actors looked, there would be a teleprompter there with the script. like if they looked up, there was one on the ceiling, if they looked down, there was one on the floor. i could not fathom the idea that they memorized their lines

the fear anti-smoking PSAs instilled in me as a child was so strong that every time i walked past someone smoking on the street (or my grandparents' house) i would hold my breath and then fucking pray

I understand most youtubers don't actually use the sponsors they advertise and they just read out the ad copy for the sponsorship, but its honestly really funny to me to have Kurtis be advertising Current, an online banking service only available in the USA he can't even use, on a video about such a painfully Canadian topic.

I grew up with all of these. House hippos live rent free in my brain. Canadian treasure and an actually great PSA about misinformation

When I was younger, I asked my dad when things stopped being black and white for him. He was so confused and asked what I meant. I continued with, "Yeah, did you just wake up one day and things were colorful?" It took him up until that point to realize I was referring to old black and white tv programs vs colored tv, and thinking the transition happened in real life like that, too. 🤦‍♀🤦‍♀(also funnier when you consider I had accidentally under-handedly called my dad old af, too 😂)

I think KurtisTown needs its own PSA. I vote for Barbie saying “Balls” Other options are; Bratz doll saying “ew” The weasel moaning

“I can’t watch anything on Netflix these days, there’s just no commercials.” Don’t worry Kurtis, Netflix heard you.

don't worry kurtis, i also thought house hippos were real. i always thought the only reason i never saw one was bc my bedtime was 8:30 (i did not know that i had free will and could stay up to catch one if i wanted to)

6:59 holy shit just the two seconds of "Usain Bolt is really fast" and the video cutting back like nothing happened was so much funnier than any joke he could have told there

Honestly the anti-smoking PSAs in Australia were so effective on me that the first time I met a smoker, they were a friend of my grandmother and they started to smoke, I ran away crying an hid in the bathroom until she left. I will never smoke a cigarette to this day.

The non-smoking PSAs were the creepiest. I distinctly remember one where somebody was smoking in the living room and laughing at TV and the smoke went down the hall into the baby's room and suffocated them

Yeah no, I was a dumbass kid and thought house hippos were real and my grandma fed into it by letting me leave out a piece of toast with peanut butter at night that she would take bites out of and create tiny footprints with a toy cow. I remember all these PSA's it is like a blast of nostalgia.

Honestly, as a canadian kid growing up in the 90s / early 2000s, I loved our PSA's. They were so weird or funny they made me watch and pay attention.

Dude I thought during commercials animators drew the next part of the show really fast and that's why they needed ads, so the animators could take a break. I thought that for reruns too and I was always like "I wonder if the animators get tired of drawing the same episode again."

danny is going to be so mad when he finds out you weren’t thinking critically

I think the PSA that got me the most as a kid was the one with the crack smuggling dog 😭 i was so traumatized by the idea of people smuggling drugs INSIDE dogs, I was so suspicious of every dog I met for years after lol

8:11 To be fair in some degree, the former was about actually more important and managable factors- while the other was about fitness, it was focused on appearances etc. Being fit is pretty all around an admirable goal, and much more approachable and achievable than being slim and muscled etc.

No longer a girl, but as an autistic child I read about girls “chasing boys” during recess, and I took that literally. Wanting to be a Normal Girl, I chose a boy pretty much at random and chased him down every day at recess. No one stopped me, and I have no idea what I planned to do if I ever caught him. I kind of knew that would never happen

kurtis saying “cosplaying” a british person instead of “impersonating” is so funny to me. how do you even cosplay as a british person lol

as a child i remember thinking smoking was the most explicit thing ever, to the point where if someone was smoking i would immediately avert my eyes and walk away as fast as possible. one week in 8th grade, we had to watch these videos on how smoking was bad (they were all basically psas) and i literally couldn’t watch them as they made me so uncomfortable. to this day smoking still makes me very uncomfortable lol

"There's just no comercials in Netflix!" Top ten photos taken only moments before disaster

A PSA that always bummed me out as a kid- was that smoke PSA where this person is like "smoking makes you sexy and mysterious" but at the end you hear the heart monitor and see a patient in a wheelchair like "but also gives you cancer" and I was like. " o k...."

Kurtis saying he wasn’t “cosplaying” a British person as if we don’t actually exist outside of movies/tv shows 💀 Edit: Kurtis was totally right. My arms have started disintegrating, I think I’m returning back into the digital realm. I guess British people really don’t exist.

17:10 as somebody whose gonna become an pharmacist, I can confidently say thats what we do :)

the cat screaming from the pharmacist woke my cat up and he was not happy lmao

Fun thing about Goosebumps! I read somewhere that R.L. Stine avoided anything bad in his stories that was real - stuff like broken homes or abuse - because he wanted to make sure that the kids knew it was all fake and that they were safe from the stuff in his books. Plus he kept humor very prevalent in his books so that it wasn't too scary! Take this with a grain of salt, I remember reading it but honestly it could have been a load of house hippos, lol.

13:53 Coraline and Dont Hug Me Im Scared(kinda, its really gorey, and covers adult topics but looks like a kids show, so think it counts. plus it was my cildhood show.)

House hippos became the go-to excuse for leaving crumbs everywhere and I unironically had "don't put it in your mouth" on my iPod shuffle back in the day. Thank you, company's name that I completely missed and didn't go back to find for this comment. My childhood was better, if not safer, because of you.

When I was a kid there was this one PSA with a woman dressed in white and she said stuff like "my name is cocaine, I can make you feel amazing" and as it went on, she started rotting and becoming this zombie creature, it was horrific and probably the main reason why I never did drugs.

He finally did it. With the beanie he’s completed his stereotypical stoner cosplay

I remember this like “The first naturally born smoker” PSA and it was terrifying

no because as a child i used to think that musicians would perform their songs on the radio everyday everytime i heard them on the radio. it was extremely perplexing to me that green day and beyonce would just stay at the stations all day everyday

Whenever Kurtis explains a joke, it's actually a joke itself. The punchline is that explaining jokes usually ruin them, so as a professional comedian, he's constantly ruining his jokes in an ironic way. Because it's ironic, the joke is not actually ruined, but instead trumped by the joke of explaining it.

I had a fushigi ball as a kid-extremely disappointed that it wasn’t ACTUALLY magic

I remember that when I was a kid I used to think that every KZfaq video was a live stream and if I played the game that the KZfaqr was playing and got lucky I would be in the video.

4:46 I freaking love it when kurtis waggles his finger accusingly at the viewer lmfao

“Not every joke needs a green-screen sketch.” Proceeds to almost immediately do a green-screen sketch.

the “little lungs in a great big world” for anti smoking was so terrifying. it was so realistic and it was so creepy and like meaty

as soon as i saw that dimly lit kitchen pure joy flooded through me. I used to make little beds for house hippos in my closet in hopes of seeing one

My favourite Canadian commercial was for marine land I think specifically the 2013 one 😂😂 you know “EVERYONE LOVES MARINELAND”

When I was a kid, a friend of my dad's was in a refrigerator commercial. When I met the guy in real life for the first time, I was so shocked because I recognized him from the ad, and I asked him how he got out of the tv because I thought he lived in there, just like all the other tv people.

the last psa was actually horrifying solely because of the puppets they’re horrendous oh my god

Yo that plot twist tho at 10:50 got me good 😂

16:27 will traumatize me foor the rest of my life

As a kid for far too long I thought actors dying or getting hurt was real. I was so blown away by the commitment to make just a movie.

The house hippo commercial fooled me as a kid, I kept leaving out toast and peanut butter and my mom told me to stop. When I told her I wanted to attract a house hippo, she said they didn't live in Saskatchewan. I'm still not totally convinced they aren't real.

I was wondering where the “House Hippo” thing came from. It’s been living rent free in my head since, I don’t know, 2006? Maybe? Never knew what it was, and though I didn’t think house hippos were real, I am more amazed it has been a core memory even though I saw it exactly once during the late hours of the night. After that, it mysteriously vanished from the lineup of Betty Crocker commercials, cleaning product infomercials and adverts for toys that sounded so much cooler than they actually were. Haven’t seen it since. At least not til this video dug it up for me, apparently.

Growing up in a rural area the thing I feared most was farm safety day. They used to put us in a room while someone showed us farm safety videos that would get really graphic at times. Shit had me traumatized and afraid to visit my grandparent's farm. The one that fucked me up most was when this kid drowns in a slough and his mother is screaming when she finds his hat in the water.

One of the most hard hitting PSA ads I ever remember was an ad for the speed limit, I think. In the UK in the mid to late 2000s there was an ad where it would show this child, dead on the road, bones all fucked up and there would be a voice over of the child saying "if you hit me at 40 there's an 80% chance I'll die, hit me at 30 and there's an 80% chance I'll live" and then the kids bones all crack into place, the blood goes back into the body and they wake up. It was fucked.

One of my teachers had a little daughter who misunderstood the cracked eggs in the frying pan PSA. She though when they said, this is your brain on drugs, that they meant eggs are drugs. so she wouldn't eat eggs.

In Mexico we had two PSAs that were… weird one was this flower singing about not doing dr ugs and an addict but it was like if u were hallucinating, the other one was one of this men that dresses as a child (Chabelo) that said something about if someone touched you or something you had to be very careful and tell an adult, but it was weird that a man-child said that

11:31 damn that takes me back to when I would play Mario with my cousin and I thought the enemies were like employees in Nintendo HQ controlling the goombas and koopas and things and I got really pissed off whenever I died because it meant a real person just beat me.

Best part is that the PSA's where so focused on regular cigarettes that they got a whole generation that hated cigarettes, but thought VAPING was the shit 💀

When I was a kid I thought I wasn't Native "because I have hair and not feathers!" lmao. Like thanks to media I thought "real" Native people actually grew feathers out of their heads, because the ones in media are never seen without feathers in their hair. My dad still brings it up lol.

When I was younger I thought that the reason certain songs played on the radio was because that’s who was at the radio station, like 100s of artists giving live shows everyday at a radio station

I’m so late watching this video but I relate to your Michael Jackson thought so much! When I was a kid (and honestly early teens cause I refused to ask anyone) I was CONVINCED that when I listened to CDs on my Walkman that the band was tiny and playing the songs so I wouldn’t repeat a song more than once cause I thought they would get tired playing the same song over and over! also thought this exact thought about the radio and cassette tapes 😂

as a young Canadian i truly believed house hippos existed and was CRUSHED when my mom told me they were in fact fake

I have, “we are girls and we will do what’s right for us.” Absolutely STAMPED into my memory.

13:38 i can't remember if it was goosebumps or not but it was this movie or episode whatever where this girl had this life sized doll of herself (first of all, that's weird as fuck) and it started going against her and trying to kill her or turn her in to a doll i guess and it wasn't even scary but i was so young when i saw it that it kinda scarred me and has stuck with me to this day edit: i googled it, it's from the rl stine series 'the haunting hour' and it's called 'really you'

Man, as a fellow Canadian boi around the same age range as you, this whole video was pure nostalgia of memories o forgot I even had. Thank you

The Fushigi ball is technically something called a “contact juggling” ball, and the Fushigi itself is like the most hated brand of contact juggling ball by contact jugglers because it was just a cash grab to sell to children, and not a serious contact juggling prop. There are some great places to buy them and people can do some amazing tricks with them, but Fushigi is like the “we have contact juggling ball at home” ball when you ask people who are deep into the hobby

I remember a german anti-piracy ad that they would play in front of every movie where a mother and a bunch of kids were singing "happy birthday" under a PRISON window and at the end the mother would say "just four more times singing until daddy gets home :(" it was wild. It's called "Noch viermal singen" on youtube incase you wanna look it up lol

This reminds me of when I was a kid and after Sunday school I asked my parents what it was like for them when they left Egypt for the promised land 😂😂😂

Concerned children's advertising made me the man I am today. Truly masterpieces. Bring them back immediately. Don't make new ones. Just put these ones on the air again

It’s so funny that I think we - as a collective of Canadian children - all had the exact same experience with that house hippo ad. The last part of it was just wah-wah-wah-wah from Charlie Brown and the first bit was pure, bona fide FACT. I genuinely don’t even remember hearing the wrap up. It did not exist. 😴

I remember that house hippo psa very vividly because I was ENRAGED that house hippos were not real as a child. I definitely cried about it

I was an insecure young/pre teen with asthma when I saw those first PSAs... so that was great.

there were a few of those puppet drug psa ads, they freaked me the hell out as a kid but weirdly fascinated me. but now as an adult who LOVES Muppets and creepy things they're my favorite ones to think on. my least favorite were the live action ones like the doctor in the morgue, or a girl having a giant breakdown and trashing her room and yelling about how drugs affect you.

The house hippo PSA was one of my absolute faves as a kid. Same with the don't put it in your mouth song PSA lmao

Okay but the monkey “you don’t have to lose weight” one genuinely helped me as a little girl lmao😭

one thing about Kurtis' sketches is that they progressively get more insane as the video continues. never let them know your next move.

12:25 same, Kurtis, same.

Jokes on you robot man, I can also put my leg back on. I won’t play safe.

I was born and raised in the USA. Even still, I had heard the rumors of house hippos and thought they were real for YEARS. Thanks for shedding some light, Kurtis.

For me it wasn’t the Fushigi ball (kinda), but it was those hose connectors where you could fill up water balloons and when the balloons got big enough they would just fall off the connector-.

I remember the lalaloopsy loopy hair commercial and I begged my mom for that doll for Christmas and she went to 6 different stores to find it only for my to play with it for 2 months till I got bored

Here in NZ we have a pretty intense drinking culture and so we had accordingly intense drinking PSAs. The one that messed with me the most was a guy who was drunk at a family gathering and spun a kid around by the arms as a 'helicopter ride' and slammed her into a bookcase. I would swap channels every time it came on, I couldn't stand it

In Argentina in the early 2000s there was a PSA about road safety that started with people being asked why they don't wear seatbelt, the tone of the psa seemed lighthearted at first, like they were going to be asking around the whole time ( one of the answers was "Because it wrinkles my clothes") Then, there is a sudden tone shift were they show mannequins for crash tests being ABSOLUTE FUCKING WRECKED and then and ACTUAL PERSON (I tought that at the time ) being SMASHED through the WINDSHIELD and a close up of their dead eyes and then a dry cut saying "Lets fight for our lives". I still think about it sometimes lol

*kid making dinosaur noises* *kid tap dancing in a deli* "moooom Jason cut me in half again!" Those psas are still burnt into my head, and the wild house hippo ad, classic.

I’m so Canadian I noticed that the first PSA used different music than the original

The thought of startling random children on the street had me in tears. Also I was at a rave last night and there was a girl with a Fushigi, I thought she was a witch

Thank you Kurtis, we know how tiring it is being in this little box performing videos for us every day 😔🙏🏻

19:39 this made me laugh very stupidly I don’t know why it’s always so funny every time I see it

There’s actually 3 different versions of the “Hip Choice” drug ad with the puppets. The version shown here, an alternate version where he doesn’t take off his glasses and a very rare version which features a zoom in on the eyes.

as far as scaring children into not doing bad things goes, my favorite has got to be this one illustrated german book, Struwwelpeter. It's from 1845. Some guy was annoyed that there were no good books to gift to his 3y/o son, so he decided to make one. All the stories are like "this little girl thought matches were super cool and wanted to play with them, but her mother told her not to, because she could get hurt. later on, the girl's parents went somewhere and left the girl home alone, so she decided to play with matches and literally burned to death, her cats cried over the little pile of ash that was left of her", "this boy kept sucking on his thumbs even though his parents told him not to. one day, a random tailor came along and cut off the boy's thumbs with his big scissors", "this boy did not want to eat his soup. over the next five days, he wasted away and died from hunger". fantastic stuff, i'm sure his 3y/o son loved that.

There were some old English PSAs about burning yourself on sparklers and drinking chemicals. The sound of the screams the little girl makes after ingesting the chemicals has been seared into my brain. Genuinely haunting.

When I was around 4-5,my mom went to the corner store real quick to get some groceries ( literally it was no more than a 2 minute drive ). She told me to "watch" my infant brother. Now, we weren't alone, my older sister was in the other room but since I was in the living room with my brother, who couldn't be more that 6 months old, while he was having tummy time, I got to be BIG sister and "baby sit" my younger brother. When my mom came home, I was sitting on his butt/upper legs. When she asked what the h e l l I was doing I could only respond "You told me to babysit." There was a baby. So I sat. 25 years later, I'm still stupid as all get out sometimes.

The beatdown of nostalgia I got from one psa after the other! I remember wanting that little hippo, back before I knew that not only are they fake, but if they had the chance, they would bite my fingers off