Popular Culture
In the 1980s, the US Department of Transportation launched a series of public service announcements in magazines and on television featuring the antics of two talking crash dummies named Vince and Larry who modeled seat belt safety practices through their slapstick antics. The campaign, with its slogan "You can Learn a Lot from a Dummy," was very popular, and since then crash dummy characters remain a common sight in seat belt safety campaigns, especially those aimed at children.
In the early 1990s, Tyco Toys created a line of action figures called The Incredible Crash Dummies based on the characters from the ads. The colorful toys were intended to fall apart at the touch of a button on their stomachs and could easily be re-assembled. Vehicles could also be bought, which could similarly be crashed into walls and broken, and easily put back together. The popularity of the toys prompted a one-hour television special, The Adventures of the Incredible Crash Dummies. Unique for its time, the cartoon was produced entirely using 3D computer animation techniques. A comic book series was also produced as well as a video game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy.
In 2004, a series of "Crash Dummies" animated shorts were commissioned for the FOX network, thus spawning another series of toys from Mattel through the Hot Wheels brand.
The television series MythBusters employs a crash test dummy, "Buster", for experiments that are too risky for the human hosts to try. In Discovery kids' children's educational series Crash Test Danny the title character is a living breathing crash test dummy played by Ben Langley who gets crushed, exploded and pulled apart all in the name of science.
Read more about this topic: Crash Test Dummy
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