The Iron Eyes Cody Commercials

People start pollution. People can stop it.

Maybe the most famous tear in pop culture is Iron Eyes Cody, an actor in Native American clothing who shows us the tragedy of littering. He debuted Earth Day, April 22, 1971, at the close of a public service advertisement for the anti-litter organization Keep America Beautiful.

The ad contributed to increased environmental consciousness in the U.S., particularly during the 1970s. The commercials helped spur the passage of anti-littering laws and programs such as The Clean Water Act (1972),  The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (1976), and the creation of recycling initiatives in cities nationwide.

At the time of the commercial’s debut, the counterculture was starting to embrace Native American Culture. Iron Eyes Cody could be seen in printed ads, television, and billboards. He was known by the press as the “Crying Indian.”

Born on April 3, 1904, as Espera Oscar de Corti, Cody’s parents were both Sicilian immigrants (Antonio de Corti and his wife, Francesca Salpietra). He grew up in Gueydan, Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, where his parents ran a grocery store.

He portrayed Indians in television shows and movies dating back to 1926. His last appearance was in the 1970s spoof movie The Spirit of 76 released in 1990. He played the role on-screen as well as off…He would deny he wasn’t Native American as late as 1996 and until he passed away in 1999 at the age of 94.

Real or not he did have an effect on me…To a young kid, this hit home. I remember this commercial rather well and there is another anti-littering commercial that I remember. Only people in Tennessee would probably remember it was called “Tennessee Trash.” I have it below the Iron Eye’s Cody video.

The ad remains one of the most memorable and emotionally impactful of all commercials to be made. 

The below commercial in 1976 was so popular that they remade it twenty-two years later. I have to say the song will stay in your head. It was filmed on an unopened stretch of I-24 at the time. The theme was sung by country singer-songwriter Ed Bruce and features Irving Kane as the ultimate litterbug.

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Author: Badfinger (Max)

Power Pop fan, Baseball, Beatles, Alternative music, old movies, and tv show fan. Also anything to do with pop culture in the 60s and 70s... I'm also a songwriter, bass and guitar player. Not the slightest bit interested in politics at all.

51 thoughts on “The Iron Eyes Cody Commercials”

  2. Pingback: The Iron Eyes Cody Commercials – MobsterTiger

  4. I don’t remember the Indian probably because I didn’t watch a lot of TV in the 70s. I do remember the litter bug commercials from the 60’s and once my sister dropped something on the ground and my dad called her a litter bug and she started crying saying that she was not a little bug.

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  8. wow, he was Italian, I didn’t know that. anyway, I remember those commercials and am all for them. Just getting people to do something as simple as stop throwing garbage out of their cars as they drive along or as they walk down the road is a positive step. Our previous house, we used to live a few doors away from a public school , a lot of kids would walk to school by our house (more often than not with parents). Almost every second day I’d be out there with a shopping bag picking up unbelievalbe amounts of garbage thrown along, and even in the hedge. Mainly snack wrappers and soft drink bottles and cans, but at times clothing, seemingly broken electronics, of course once in awhile the ‘let’s let gloves for that’ kind of stuff too. It was a drag.

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  9. One of THE great commercials of all time. I knew he wasn’t a Native American, but only found out later.

    Do you remember the anti-smoking commercial where the little kid is following his dad around the car and mimicking (sp?) everything his dad does; then dad lights up a cigarette? That was another powerful one for me.

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  10. p.s. never saw the TN trash one. I think whoever came up with the idea of bottle deposits was a genius. I think they should have a filter deposit added to packs of cigs and let people return them for a penny apiece. I bet you’d see those despicable filters cleaned up everywhere.

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  13. They hopefully had an effect. Sadly when you think you’ve fixed the problem- IE, broken bottles smashed everywhere? They thoughtfully replaced ’em with plastic ones… Now there’s plastic particle pollution. Hey folks, it gets in your blood! Dump your plastic in the recycling bin at least!

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    1. Yea plastic is too much everywhere now days. The funny thing is….not funny but I’ve seen stores only give you paper bags NO plastic…which is fine to me…but every single thing in the store is wrapped with….. plastic.

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      1. Agree, way too much plastic wrap. Here, a few years back they banned those flyaway plastic supermarket carry bags. This encouraged you to tote your own bags. It all helps, and at least its a start. There’s probably a mini industry out there making chic ‘natural’ shopping bags- cotton, jute, hemp even. (I guess hemp would be ‘high end?’🙄) And the big supermarkets have bags you can buy there, paper bags 50 cents each, for 89 cents you can buy a stronger supermarket branded woven recycled… plastic one. So I bring my own or go the paper route.

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  14. They were good commercials. I remember him in many back in the day. We have a saying in Texas that rounded up many of our famous folks like, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Willie, Waylon and the boys, a bunch of actors, cowboy cheerleaders, Jerry Jones, famous authors and such and turned them into commercials that said..”Don’t Mess With Texas.” It’s talking about trash on the roads, but it could mean don’t mess with us Texans, if you know what’s good fer ya.

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      1. I was in HEB a few days ago and saw three old guys, each with a pistola strapped to their belt. It’s still the wild west here. Don’t Mess With Texas takes on a different persona.

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  15. here we had a Brit that called himself Grey Owl….I’m not sure if he ever actually pretended to be something he wasn’t he just took on the culture, became a follower of the culture, and then decade laters we turned on him…sort of like what Buffy St Marie has gone through recently…..but we needed to pay more attention to the environment concerns decades ago, with Mercy Mercy Me Marvin Gay and Joni Mitchell with Big Yellow Taxi….

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    1. I’ll have to look him up…Grey Owl.
      Yea no one really argued about him being Italian until after he was in the later half of his career.

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  17. Since this obviously was an American TV ad, it wasn’t shown on German TV, so I didn’t know it. Kudos for airing PSAs about the thoughtlessness of littering. Sadly, it still happens!

    Come to think of it, I don’t recall seeing any such PSAs on German TV while growing up there. I’m not saying that’s because Germans don’t litter.

    What I do recall is a series of PSAs about responsible driving. It was called “Der 7. Sinn” (the 7th sense). Basically, these PSAs showed car accidents resulting from thoughtless driving.

    One example was aquaplaning where you saw a car going at high speed during a downpour with the driver losing control. “Mit 80 fahren Sie Wasserski” (at 80 kilometers an hour you’re going waterskiing).

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      2. That sounds like my most recent luck….bought two new cars in my life…a Mini in 2008 and a Sonic in 2013…both went out before 4 years and low milage. I said never again.

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      4. Oh I loved my Mini Shelia. I got it in 2008…that was the year they changed engines and in 2012 it died…I was pissed…. 140,000 miles on it.

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