Episode 33: Smokey Bear Was a Wartime Propaganda Campaign

Smokey Bear has been telling you "only you" can prevent wildfires since 1944, but almost nobody knows the real story behind the mascot, or the bear.

This week on Lies We Bought, we trace Smokey from a Japanese submarine shelling the California coast in 1942, through the ad campaign the government built to keep Americans scared of matches, to a real orphaned bear cub pulled out of a burning New Mexico mountainside in 1950.

We get into the Disney licensing deal that almost never happened, the New York City firefighter whose nickname got borrowed for the whole campaign, and how "only you can prevent wildfires" became one of the most successful, and most misleading, PSAs in American history. If you've ever wondered why a cartoon bear became a federal employee with his own zip code, this is the episode.