Throughout political campaigns in history we have seen many different evolutions from debates to political ads on television. Since political ads became big in 1952, there have been a few ads that have made a large mark, and even some that have changed the course of political campaigning. Few of the oldies-but-goodies have been updated, repurposed, and made prevalent in this year’s election cycle. One of these ads was put on television in 1964 by the Lyndon Johnson campaign and was redone and reused by the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016. This ad is known as the Peace Little Girl (Daisy) ad in 1964 and called Daisy in 2016 as titled on the Living Room Candidate website. In these two ads I will look at the common themes and discuss how
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This commercial started out with a little girl pulling pedals off of a flower while counting to ten. Then the little girl looked up and the camera zooms in on her eye until the screen goes black and the camera then counts down from ten and you hear and see the sound and vision of an atomic bomb blowing up. After that it moves to President Johnson’s voice, high over the image, saying, “These are the stakes—to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or go into the dark. We must either lover each other or we must die.” At the end of the commercial it flashed to a black screen with white writing that is spoken as, “Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay …show more content…
In the opening it is a little girl, this is a visual image that speaks volumes to mothers, fathers, and grandparents as well as brothers and sisters. It seems that the use of a little girl suggests innocence, and that her innocence will be stolen if people don’t vote for Johnson. If it were a little boy, a teen, or an adult it could have been more like a piece of propaganda to get men and teens to join the military. When someone sees what could be a daughter or a sister in that kind of video it functions to create motivation to vote against whatever is the cause of that. Meaning it makes the audience feel like Johnsons opponent is on board with nuclear warfare being around their children. An example of a symbolic representation is the use of the nuclear explosion mushroom cloud along with the sound of the explosion. This is a cloud that is widely known to pretty much mean negative things, and functions as a scare tactic for people who could be leaning away from Johnson to realize a vote for Goldwater is a vote for nuclear war. In the 1960’s, the fear of Nuclear war was real, in this quote from The History Learning site, it outlines a fear that was felt by Americans at the time of this election, “During the 1960’s the theory of MAD developed – Mutually Assured Destruction. This meant that if Russia attacked the west, the west would make
This commercial started out with a little girl pulling pedals off of a flower while counting to ten. Then the little girl looked up and the camera zooms in on her eye until the screen goes black and the camera then counts down from ten and you hear and see the sound and vision of an atomic bomb blowing up. After that it moves to President Johnson’s voice, high over the image, saying, “These are the stakes—to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or go into the dark. We must either lover each other or we must die.” At the end of the commercial it flashed to a black screen with white writing that is spoken as, “Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay …show more content…
In the opening it is a little girl, this is a visual image that speaks volumes to mothers, fathers, and grandparents as well as brothers and sisters. It seems that the use of a little girl suggests innocence, and that her innocence will be stolen if people don’t vote for Johnson. If it were a little boy, a teen, or an adult it could have been more like a piece of propaganda to get men and teens to join the military. When someone sees what could be a daughter or a sister in that kind of video it functions to create motivation to vote against whatever is the cause of that. Meaning it makes the audience feel like Johnsons opponent is on board with nuclear warfare being around their children. An example of a symbolic representation is the use of the nuclear explosion mushroom cloud along with the sound of the explosion. This is a cloud that is widely known to pretty much mean negative things, and functions as a scare tactic for people who could be leaning away from Johnson to realize a vote for Goldwater is a vote for nuclear war. In the 1960’s, the fear of Nuclear war was real, in this quote from The History Learning site, it outlines a fear that was felt by Americans at the time of this election, “During the 1960’s the theory of MAD developed – Mutually Assured Destruction. This meant that if Russia attacked the west, the west would make