The last time Marie-Laure Klein saw her son Max, he was throwing stones at a sarcastic, cigar-smoking crow that had landed in their garden. Within moments, the four-year-old — along with the tricycle he was riding — were gone, victim of an anvil that had mysteriously dropped from the sky.
“I didn’t know falling anvils were real,” said Klein, a 36-year-old HVAC specialist who lives in Steinfort. “I thought they were imaginary, like magic shrink rays and frogs in top hats singing classic show tunes.”
Safety experts estimate that as many as 500 people a year are killed by mysterious falling anvils, yet most families do little to protect themselves against this, a most tragicomic of deaths, and critics say the blame lies squarely with the cartoon industry.
In the 1930s, with the number of deaths-by-falling-anvil skyrocketing, American animation studios decided to raise awareness. Soon, feature-length movies came with a short animated featurette showing funny but often rascally critters getting crushed by an anvil.
The lesson was clear: don’t be a rascal, and always look up, especially when you hear a whistle coming from above. The Warner Bros. character Wile E. Coyote, originally named Anvil Arnie, was so successful at reducing the number of anvil deaths that the studio developed other characters to join in the fight for public safety. Elmer Fudd educated hunters about the dangers of shotguns that had been tied in a bow, and Pepé Le Pew was created to warn women about the dangers of catching venereal diseases from francophone skunks.
By the early 1960s, the number of people killed by falling anvils had dropped to zero, so Warner Bros. allowed its Looney Tunes division to take more creative liberties with its cartoons. Anvils became a thing of the past. Wile E. Coyote and other characters were now getting maimed by exploding packets of chili powder, giant malfunctioning springs, and dehydrated boulders that gain hundreds of times their original mass with a few drops of water.
“People stopped being afraid of falling anvils, and they started being all rascally again, even as anvil deaths began to steadily climb,” said Jan Wereszczyńsk of the EU Office for the Awareness of Random Falling Objects.
Anvils have had very few appearances in any cartoon since the 1980s. “Scooby-Doo,” “The Smurfs,” “The Simpsons” and “Southpark” are just a few of the cartoons that have failed to warn audiences about falling anvils, and this neglect has carried on to the present day. A viewer would be hard-pressed to find any character who is injured or killed by random falling objects, least of all anvils.
“There is nothing funny about an adored but admittedly naughty child disappearing under a 150-pound blacksmithing tool that seems to materialize out of nowhere, gives at least eight seconds warning with a piercing whistle, and then makes a comically loud thunk as it smashes to smithereens everything in sight,” Klein said. “Well, it’s a little funny, but it’s not hilarious or anything.”
Experts fear that as many as 100,000 anvils are still in our skies, mostly held aloft by gentle but dopey birds that aren’t even aware that someone has tricked them into carrying an anvil through the air.
