A long time ago in a culture that seems far, far away, vaccinations weren’t viewed as a government plot to give kids autism. As Yahoo! Finance reminds us, vaccines used to be our answer to deadly pandemics like smallpox and measles. In 1977, to encourage parents to get their children vaccinated, the CDC turned to George Lucas. The result was a PSA campaign featuring C3PO and R2-D2, which was probably had kids clamoring to get their own whooping cough vaccine.
The poster reminds us of a simpler time when Star Wars sidekicks weren’t computer-generated and before the Galactic Pharmaceutical Federation began covertly suppressing our Midichlorians with booster shots.
We dug up a vintage commercial on YouTube, from the same Star Wars vaccination PSA campaign:
In 1983, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services also called on C3PO’s hectoring and R2’s bloops and bleeps to prevent kids from smoking: