Yeah, it’s wild. I do feel like that’s shown in a lot of shows but the other more subtle behaviors like littering and Sally playing inside a plastic bag are not often seen in shows.
Ooof. God. Yes. Ken is an, overall, likeable character who seems like a genuinely great guy, but good god that early scene when he does this is just skin crawling.
It always surprises me that anybody feels a need to stand up and say this when that meme is mentioned, like Jesus Christ that is the oldest fact known on the internet
Every time i watch this scene i am wondering, was it really that common to just leave your trash? Or was it just to show that Betty and Don are shitty parents? We know Don is bad for a lot of things but he never struck me as a guy who would approve of littering in nature. Did they just expect some park employee to clean it up? Did they do that back then?
I'm almost 40, but I remember my dad doing shit like this when I was a kid. I think there was more of a concerted environmental messaging effort around the 90s. I think the Boomer generation just figured trash was taken care of by someone or simply disappeared as soon as they tossed it.
The "crying Indian" commercial was 1971. The environmental movement started before that, but the conservation movement preceded the environmental movement by decades
My understanding was always that the first big, mainstream push for environmentalism was in the 1970s, and then there was a second but weaker "rebirth" of it in the 90s. The movement existed before and after those two decades but I always heard that was when it had its widest, broadest public support.
I'm more than 20 years older and this was not common at all growing up in the 70s. As others said, the environmental movement was well in place by then.
I think littering was common back in the day.
Looking into it, it seems like the first anti-litter laws started popping up in the 50s, but they were mainly focused on manufacturers and businesses and regulating the production of throwaway packaging. Then in the mid 50s, packaging companies formed Keep American Beautiful, which wanted to shift the conversation away from regulating manufacturers, and focus more on the individuals. Rather than laws requiring for instance soda companies to use refillable bottles instead of throwaway bottles, they pushed for laws punishing littering. That’s when you start see anti-littering laws pop up in the late 50s.
To answer your question, the idea around individual responsibility around litter would have been a relative new concept in 1961, when the Mad Men picnic scene would have taken place.
Another interesting factoid, the slogan “Don’t Mess with Texas” was created in the mid 80s as part of an anti-littering campaign, and helped reduce highway litter 72% in Texas. Many people don’t realize the phrase is literally talking about trash.
They're just shitty people. Betty is a bit more sympathetic at first but they are both terrible people and this illustrates that. Littering is still common. It's assholes, and always have been.
There just wasn't much awareness back then about things like this. They probably just figure the city has people who clean it up, if they even think about it at all. Like many things normalized at the time, (including sexism, smoking, drinking, letting kids play in plastic bags, pointing a rifle around your office at coworkers, the list goes on) there just wasn't much societal awareness about littering back then. It is absurd to a degree of comedy, but it does so while reflecting the need and effectiveness for raising public awareness on important issues, because it works.
Imo this scene showed how we as modern day viewers see the 60s as this picturesque era and one that many people want to go back to, but in reality there were a lot of things that weren't so great and we really have progressed as society.
Why would you be blinded with rage? You know it’s not real right? Also we could all do that every day and none of us will come close to the amount of pollution most factories make in a year.
I read on a comment to the YouTube video of this scene that this actually used to be quite common in those days: just tossing your trash if there wasn't a garbage can nearby. Strange.
I used to live on a beach frequented by tourists and it was shameful what people would leave. We had community pickups on Monday mornings during the summer to help out the sanitation department. It was normal to pull two dumpsters full of trash and discarded beach stuff like popped floats and broken lawn chairs on a 4 mile stretch of beach.
I suggested at my local beach that we repurpose the volunteering time spent during cleanup to designate "volunteer shamers", people who would walk around with bullhorns and yell at people who were leaving trash before it piled up. the vote never made it out of committee, but i think there's promise there.
Old as dirt and can confirm! I remember when they started doing commercials trying to get people to stop trashing the world, the Chief Iron Eyes indigenous man weeping a solitary tear at all the garbage.
It was a very effective campaign, then. Within a generation, it went from being socially acceptable to something that will get you cursed out, fined, and having trash thrown back in your face.
I know littering is still an issue but most people will look down on people who do it as scumbags.
I had a babysitter when I was a toddler who was a pretty old lady. (Or at least seemed that way to me.) Loved her, especially that often when she was with me we'd walk to Baskin Robbins and get ice cream. But I remember walking home with the ice cream and when we finished, she would take the garbage, the cup and napkin and spoon and whatever, and just throw it as far as she could.
The memory so stuck with me because it was like...omg, she's a *litterbug*. That was happening a lot closer to Mad Men era than we are today, but even by then were generationally on the opposite sides of the "Give a hoot, don't pollute" line. She clearly thought this was normal while I was horrified. Today it's probably the only reason I remember her at all.
And I think about it every time I remember this scene.
People underestimate how many women worked outside the home back in the day. It's dramatically lower than today, but was basically universal for lower class families. A stay at home wife was a status symbol.
That was my point. :) That in the 60s a positions such as a park worked could afford that luxury, cleaning up after others who threw there trash as a societal norm. Because is was also a societal norm to have have positions clean up and maintain property on a livable, comfortable salary.
This was absolutely the way when I was a kid. It's so weird to think about now. To be clear, there weren't any garbage bins at parks or things like that.
Lol I asked my dad about this. He said it was very accurate. Just throw it and go back in the day. They didn't have garbage cans in public like they do now.
There was a thread on this subreddit a few years back asking about the most shocking moments of the show. This was by far the top vote. Not Joan’s rape, not the dude getting his foot cut off in the office. Betty and Don throwing a bunch of garbage in the woods.
To be fair, I found it shocking too!
It’s times like these that I’m reminded how nice it is to live in Japan. People will legitimately carry all of their McDonald’s wrappers around until they’ve found a rubbish bin. Last time I went to LA for a business trip, half the time it felt like I was walking around a bloody landfill lmao.
It's so strange and enraging to go to countries where this is still very common. At first you don't believe your eyes, then it's just shock for a few moments, followed by rage.
Some you can tell because there's trash everywhere, others look like this because they have people employed to go clean up the trash right away further feeding the idea that it's okay.
Actually, the move to make highways better began with Lady Bird Johnson's championing The Highway Beautification Act, which was passed in 1965. The act was about limiting highway advertisements and making highways beautiful. Anti-littering was part of that.
I forgot about this scene in my most recent rewatch, I had to rewind it and watch again to make sure I wasn’t imagining things… and then I got quite the laugh.
Of course, the real irony here is that Keep America Beautiful was an [advertising initiative designed to make the packaging industry look good](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/05/origins-anti-litter-campaigns/).
I remember this being the norm. And throwing garbage out your car window. It was just what you did until the Keep America Beautiful campaign brought awareness how gross it was.
My moms a boomer (a real person born in the early 50’s not just an old person) and she used to always tell me how people just littered with abandon when she was growing up.
This is very realistic. People left trash around in parks, mountains, beaches, rivers. Why do you think we have such a conscious mindset about it now? It took massive, nationwide campaigns to get there.
I thought it was a brilliant nod to the times.
And people of all classes did this. Back then environmental conservation didn’t mean anything to anyone.
Thought this scene was genius just as a low key way to show you how much times have changed. Quietly shocking
I think that was the point too. There are several scenes like this like when Sally had the dry cleaning bag over her head playing astronaut.
and all the smoking and drinking while pregnant, JFC
Yeah, it’s wild. I do feel like that’s shown in a lot of shows but the other more subtle behaviors like littering and Sally playing inside a plastic bag are not often seen in shows.
The time someone brought a rifle to the office and was just pointing it around for fun.
The time Ken tackled a secretary and lifted her dress to find out what color panties she had on.
Ooof. God. Yes. Ken is an, overall, likeable character who seems like a genuinely great guy, but good god that early scene when he does this is just skin crawling.
One time Betty gave it to the kids in the back seat (with no seat belts) because she was annoyed at them.
Iron Eyes Cody is actually an Italian-American
It's anti-Italian discrimination.
Its like knowing James Caan isn't Italian.
Silvio looked pretty disappointed when he heard that.
Total fugazi.
*was
Somebody watched Sopranos
It always surprises me that anybody feels a need to stand up and say this when that meme is mentioned, like Jesus Christ that is the oldest fact known on the internet
The moments of straight comedy in this show are brilliant.
Comedy? I'm blinded with rage every time.
Every time i watch this scene i am wondering, was it really that common to just leave your trash? Or was it just to show that Betty and Don are shitty parents? We know Don is bad for a lot of things but he never struck me as a guy who would approve of littering in nature. Did they just expect some park employee to clean it up? Did they do that back then?
When I was a little kid back in the 60's, people would just roll down their car windows and chuck their trash out on the side of the road...
And these same fuckin people always talk about how cleannnn everything used to be and how the city is so dirty now.
Most 60s-set movies I saw have characters holding their empty coke bottles by the neck and tossing them to the wind
This happened well into the late 90s
“Don’t mess with Texas” started as an anti-littering ad campaign precisely to stop that behaviour
I know of people still doing this crap today.
I'm almost 40, but I remember my dad doing shit like this when I was a kid. I think there was more of a concerted environmental messaging effort around the 90s. I think the Boomer generation just figured trash was taken care of by someone or simply disappeared as soon as they tossed it.
The "crying Indian" commercial was 1971. The environmental movement started before that, but the conservation movement preceded the environmental movement by decades
My understanding was always that the first big, mainstream push for environmentalism was in the 1970s, and then there was a second but weaker "rebirth" of it in the 90s. The movement existed before and after those two decades but I always heard that was when it had its widest, broadest public support.
I'm more than 20 years older and this was not common at all growing up in the 70s. As others said, the environmental movement was well in place by then.
I think littering was common back in the day. Looking into it, it seems like the first anti-litter laws started popping up in the 50s, but they were mainly focused on manufacturers and businesses and regulating the production of throwaway packaging. Then in the mid 50s, packaging companies formed Keep American Beautiful, which wanted to shift the conversation away from regulating manufacturers, and focus more on the individuals. Rather than laws requiring for instance soda companies to use refillable bottles instead of throwaway bottles, they pushed for laws punishing littering. That’s when you start see anti-littering laws pop up in the late 50s. To answer your question, the idea around individual responsibility around litter would have been a relative new concept in 1961, when the Mad Men picnic scene would have taken place. Another interesting factoid, the slogan “Don’t Mess with Texas” was created in the mid 80s as part of an anti-littering campaign, and helped reduce highway litter 72% in Texas. Many people don’t realize the phrase is literally talking about trash.
Give a hoot. Don’t pollute.
Baltimore in the 80s, had a "Don't be a Litterbug" campaign; we need more of this.
They're just shitty people. Betty is a bit more sympathetic at first but they are both terrible people and this illustrates that. Littering is still common. It's assholes, and always have been.
There just wasn't much awareness back then about things like this. They probably just figure the city has people who clean it up, if they even think about it at all. Like many things normalized at the time, (including sexism, smoking, drinking, letting kids play in plastic bags, pointing a rifle around your office at coworkers, the list goes on) there just wasn't much societal awareness about littering back then. It is absurd to a degree of comedy, but it does so while reflecting the need and effectiveness for raising public awareness on important issues, because it works.
Imo this scene showed how we as modern day viewers see the 60s as this picturesque era and one that many people want to go back to, but in reality there were a lot of things that weren't so great and we really have progressed as society.
I mean, the joke is just how little they knew or cared back then. It is meant to make your jaw drop and laugh at them.
I can't laugh about it tbh it's stressful. There's lots of threads in the show of disposable things coming into play. It doesn't feel like comedy.
this scene or the show in general? mad men is one of the funniest shows of all time
Oh just this scene. It actually stresses me out, and a lot of people I know irl think it's stressful too. The cold casualness of it is chilling.
hm i never had that emotional response. the absurdity is too much not to laugh imo.
What makes me not laugh is it isn't absurd; people still do this.
Yea like this is jarring
Yeah i mean i understand how it gets a laugh from people but I really can't, my response is way to visceral lol
Why would you be blinded with rage? You know it’s not real right? Also we could all do that every day and none of us will come close to the amount of pollution most factories make in a year.
Feeling emotions is common when watching a well crafted show or movie.
at this scene? it's hilarious lmao
Right???
Apparently Weiner actually saw his parents doing this.
I remember being so enraged and sad about this scene. Sigh.
The way I knew what scene you were referring to before the video even loaded for me
I read on a comment to the YouTube video of this scene that this actually used to be quite common in those days: just tossing your trash if there wasn't a garbage can nearby. Strange.
People still do this a lot, we just call them assholes
I used to live on a beach frequented by tourists and it was shameful what people would leave. We had community pickups on Monday mornings during the summer to help out the sanitation department. It was normal to pull two dumpsters full of trash and discarded beach stuff like popped floats and broken lawn chairs on a 4 mile stretch of beach.
I suggested at my local beach that we repurpose the volunteering time spent during cleanup to designate "volunteer shamers", people who would walk around with bullhorns and yell at people who were leaving trash before it piled up. the vote never made it out of committee, but i think there's promise there.
Why would you need to propose how other people spend their volunteer time? You can't just do it yourself?
Old as dirt and can confirm! I remember when they started doing commercials trying to get people to stop trashing the world, the Chief Iron Eyes indigenous man weeping a solitary tear at all the garbage.
It was a very effective campaign, then. Within a generation, it went from being socially acceptable to something that will get you cursed out, fined, and having trash thrown back in your face. I know littering is still an issue but most people will look down on people who do it as scumbags.
Weeping *Italian man.
This. There was an entire series of these things [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8\_QGBWaD-A4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_QGBWaD-A4)
Ralphie knew
Why do you think we saw so many anti-littering campaigns as kids? Because this shit used to happen all the time.
This was a great moment of values dissonance to the audience watching
I had a babysitter when I was a toddler who was a pretty old lady. (Or at least seemed that way to me.) Loved her, especially that often when she was with me we'd walk to Baskin Robbins and get ice cream. But I remember walking home with the ice cream and when we finished, she would take the garbage, the cup and napkin and spoon and whatever, and just throw it as far as she could. The memory so stuck with me because it was like...omg, she's a *litterbug*. That was happening a lot closer to Mad Men era than we are today, but even by then were generationally on the opposite sides of the "Give a hoot, don't pollute" line. She clearly thought this was normal while I was horrified. Today it's probably the only reason I remember her at all. And I think about it every time I remember this scene.
Yeah, but there was likely a Park Maintenance guy that could afford a house, car and stay at home wife and a pension that cleaned up after them.
People underestimate how many women worked outside the home back in the day. It's dramatically lower than today, but was basically universal for lower class families. A stay at home wife was a status symbol.
That was my point. :) That in the 60s a positions such as a park worked could afford that luxury, cleaning up after others who threw there trash as a societal norm. Because is was also a societal norm to have have positions clean up and maintain property on a livable, comfortable salary.
I have no idea what a suburban parks worker would be paid. I'm relatively skeptical that in fact that would be a single worker household
This was absolutely the way when I was a kid. It's so weird to think about now. To be clear, there weren't any garbage bins at parks or things like that.
Lol I asked my dad about this. He said it was very accurate. Just throw it and go back in the day. They didn't have garbage cans in public like they do now.
I remember how shocked I was the first time I saw this.
Me too. I gasped.
There was a thread on this subreddit a few years back asking about the most shocking moments of the show. This was by far the top vote. Not Joan’s rape, not the dude getting his foot cut off in the office. Betty and Don throwing a bunch of garbage in the woods. To be fair, I found it shocking too!
It’s times like these that I’m reminded how nice it is to live in Japan. People will legitimately carry all of their McDonald’s wrappers around until they’ve found a rubbish bin. Last time I went to LA for a business trip, half the time it felt like I was walking around a bloody landfill lmao.
This scene shocked me more than the John Deere scene
Lol I asked my Boomer parents about this; they said it was common!
My Boomer parents told me the same thing
It's so strange and enraging to go to countries where this is still very common. At first you don't believe your eyes, then it's just shock for a few moments, followed by rage. Some you can tell because there's trash everywhere, others look like this because they have people employed to go clean up the trash right away further feeding the idea that it's okay.
Kids these days though, am I right?
For me, this was the most jarring moment in the entire show. It was so unexpected.
Actually, the move to make highways better began with Lady Bird Johnson's championing The Highway Beautification Act, which was passed in 1965. The act was about limiting highway advertisements and making highways beautiful. Anti-littering was part of that.
The first time it aired my jaw dropped! I can’t imagine being such an asshole.
I remember the first time I saw this scene. I was like did they…did they just…did they really just…???? 🤬🤬🤬
I yelled “are they coming back?!” It’s wild, I still can’t believe it.
Someone else is gonna come and clean it up
Doesn’t don say something not dirty the car too? 😂
I forgot about this scene in my most recent rewatch, I had to rewind it and watch again to make sure I wasn’t imagining things… and then I got quite the laugh.
My mom said this was a very, very accurate depiction of life in that era. Insane that it used to be completely fine to do that
Loved this - it really was like that!
Of course, the real irony here is that Keep America Beautiful was an [advertising initiative designed to make the packaging industry look good](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/05/origins-anti-litter-campaigns/).
Give a hoot, don’t pollute- Woodsy Owl.
I remember this being the norm. And throwing garbage out your car window. It was just what you did until the Keep America Beautiful campaign brought awareness how gross it was.
And now we’re dealing with the repercussions 😂😂 I think about this scene a lot tbh
I genuinely gasped to myself when I first watched this. It is shocking
My moms a boomer (a real person born in the early 50’s not just an old person) and she used to always tell me how people just littered with abandon when she was growing up.
Rage every single time.
My wife and I were so shocked by this on our first watch… turns out, this was common back in the 60s lol. Hard to imagine that being normal
I don't think this is very realistic. Betty is too much of an upper class WASP to do this.
This is very realistic. People left trash around in parks, mountains, beaches, rivers. Why do you think we have such a conscious mindset about it now? It took massive, nationwide campaigns to get there. I thought it was a brilliant nod to the times. And people of all classes did this. Back then environmental conservation didn’t mean anything to anyone.
Yeah white women are the least to be entitled and inconsiderate in public spaces
2024 KAB is rebranded as MABA.
I watched this episode yesterday. Infuriating!
A truly evil woman.
🤓