Doomsday for Pests

1946 AnimationDocumentary 15 minutes

Open in new tab

About Doomsday for Pests

Worried bugs watch a newsreel about a climbing death toll. The flash is that silverfish Sylvester S. Silverfish walked across a baseboard coated with Sherwin-Williams PESTROY and was dead an hour later. Another insect hops onto a cocker spaniel dusted with the powder and is gone just as fast. The reel traces DDT, taken in through the feet, from spasms to paralysis to death. Flies in a treated cage are mostly down within fifteen minutes and finished at twenty-five, and the same cage still kills months later as more DDT crystals form on the surface. The pitch is that PESTROY, sold as powder and liquid, carries more DDT than government specifications, and that people are not the ones it harms.

More about Doomsday for Pests

Jerry Fairbanks produced this sponsored short for Sherwin-Williams. It sells PESTROY, a DDT coating, as a mix of animated bug news and live-action cage tests.

Themes

  • A bug newsreel of obituaries
  • DDT through the feet
  • A timed fly-cage test
  • A paint company's wartime insecticide
  • PESTROY
  • DDT
  • Sherwin-Williams
  • silverfish
  • fly cage
  • cocker spaniel
  • sponsored film

Background

PESTROY's selling point is DDT, the wartime insecticide. Paul Hermann Müller received the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering its effect on insects.

Technique

Cartoon obituaries are cut against color live-action tests of powder and liquid on treated surfaces.

Preservation

The A/V Geeks print on the Internet Archive runs 14 minutes 43 seconds, in color and with sound. No copyright notice appears on the film, and it is in the public domain in the United States.

Notes

  • The opening obituary is for Sylvester S. Silverfish, dead an hour after crossing a treated baseboard.
  • One victim's exit is a hop onto a cocker spaniel dusted with PESTROY powder.
  • The cage test is timed: some flies down in five minutes, most gone by fifteen, all dead or dying at twenty-five.
  • A repeat of that test months later is used to show crystals still forming on the coating.
  • The narration calls DDT a wartime development that saved human lives and killed insects by the billion.

Scenes

  • Sylvester's obituary plays for the insect audience.
  • A bug hops onto a dusted cocker spaniel and is counted as a clean kill.
  • Flies in the treated cage collapse on a clock that runs to twenty-five minutes.
  • The same cage is tested again months later, with more crystals on the surface.

Also available

  • Internet Archive (DoomsdayForPests)
  • Wikimedia Commons (Doomsday for Pests (1946) (raw version).webm)

Quotes

Death came today to Sylvester S. Silverfish.