5 Old Comic Book Ads That Tried to Get Children Killed

Cracked columnist Seanbaby takes us back to a time when it was perfectly acceptable to let your toddler hunt man-eating wild animals and frolic through the flaming wreckage of a plane crash--possibly during the same camping trip. That's what these very real old-time comic book ads have led us to believe, anyway.

That's right, kids: You can earn a rifle. A gorilla-killing rifle. Starting now, the rest of my life is narrowed down to two goals: Goal one is selling you some salve or whatever, and goal two is killing gorillas from the back of my live pony.

If you see anyone at any time doing anything else, that's not me. By the way, if there was really a zoo cool enough to leave the gorilla cages open and let little boys and girls come in fully armed, Mickey Mouse would have to give out free blowjobs to keep Disneyland from going bankrupt.

Also:

The fact that the gorilla immediately recognized the children's weapons means it's probably been shot many, many times.

Meet Tootsie Roll mascot Captain Tootsie: the face of a baby with the body of a Nazi and bear-killing supermachine. His only weakness is that he needs Tootsie Rolls to accomplish any single thing he does.

Captain Tootsie woke up one morning and decided it was he and his candy's responsibility to teach the world about science, so he often ruined his adventures with educational bullshit. No kid reading a comic book ever said, "I can't wait to see how Batman is going to kill the giant squi- wait, what's this about Tootsie Rolls? And hold on, what's this now about radar?"

It required so many miracles of time, space and birth defects for a kid to finish reading a Captain Tootsie ad that it's no wonder that most of us grew up not knowing how important candy is in an emergency. It wasn't until the late 90s before 911 dispatchers were issued Tootsie Rolls, and did you know that some primitive countries still have their fire hydrants hooked up to water instead of delicious candy?

If I ever need to get rescued by a group of toddlers and a man with a yellow purse whose only extraction plan is to quickly eat Tootsie Rolls, just let me explode with the goddamn plane. Just take a look at the "Secret Legion" for a second:

The Secret Legion is three eight-year-olds, and one of them is fat. Why in the name of fuck would a rescue worker bring three second graders and a bag of candy to a downed plane? I'll tell you this: If Captain Tootsie isn't a pedophile, he has a lot of explaining to do.

Let me interrupt this adventure right here to say I don't trust anyone who's excited that his name is Coon Tail Charlie, but more importantly, I don't trust anyone who lives in the woods. And this isn't an affectation I developed to look cool when I'm asked about people from the woods. Due to insane, sociophobic parents, I grew up on a goat farm in Eastern Oregon. One day my brother and I were walking through the woods behind our house when an old man burst from a log cabin with a shotgun screaming, "Get off my property!" We did, because we knew just enough about seven and 10 year-old children to know they weren't bullet proof.

Later, we learned that this old man travelled to town twice a year to buy canned goods and bleach. The bleach was to kill the germs on the food, no doubt put there by communists. My point is that people who live in the woods are crazy and think everything is trying to kill them. If one of them says a bear is a killer bear, you should remember that he also thinks the moon is plotting your murder and your pants are building a mind-control device on your balls.

It's true that no matter how many Tootsie Rolls you have, you should fear bears. They're nature's fish-slapping tanks; they're not going to clap for you while you tickle their belly. You should consider it a very polite gesture every time they don't tear you apart with their massive claws. However, if a bear is running away from a group of little kids and their magnificent man-baby troupe leader, the only thing it's ever going to kill is a bag of camper marshmallows.

There's no sport in killing an animal like that; that's the kind of bear they'll one day invent bear wheelchairs for. Don't get me wrong, I'm not some animal rights activist. In fact, I firmly believe that once you're born without thumbs, fuck you and ride a little bike around until I'm tired of watching it. I'm just saying.

After all this, I still have no idea what Tootsie Rolls have to do with murdering bears. There was a tiny mention in the fourth panel about all the energy Tootsie Rolls can give you when you're poaching wildlife, but only as an afterthought. It was as if the writer had to quickly adapt his old script about killing bears to make his Tootsie Roll deadline. Also, what would you do if you were a park ranger this night? Say you drove up and saw Captain Tootsie and the Secret Legion raising cheers to Tootsie Rolls around the corpse of a bear they killed out of season and hung from a tree:

You wouldn't even wait to roll down the window before you opened fire.