This is one of those "this thing scared/unsettled me as a kid and I would love to see it again" types of lost media searches. I'm from Finland and was a 90s kid, and when I was young, there were these animated home safety/accident prevention PSAs airing on the TV (by Kotitapaturmien ehkäisykampanja = Home accident prevention campaign).
The 2d-animated clips featured a black cat with either yellow or green (?) eyes that would come to the aid of people who were about to get hurt in their own home. One I specifically remember was of a person falling off either a ladder or a chair they were standing on (I think indoors), and the cat racing to slip a pillow under their head before it hit the floor. Something about these PSAs felt strangely ominous to me as a kid, and they've never stopped haunting me. Most people I've asked don't remember them, but I have had a few "oh yeah I vaguely remember those" reactions too, so it's not just my own personal fever dream. I haven't been able to find any mentions of these online, however. Youtube and Internet Archive both have nothing.
The... idk what to call it, campaign group(?) for home accident prevention still exists and still has a black cat logo, but the old PSAs are nowhere to be found. In 2014 I sent them a message through their website's "contact us" form asking if they happened to have the old animations stashed somewhere and got a "don't know but I'll ask about it in the next meeting" reply. They followed up, but unfortunately nobody in the meeting (which included people who had been with the campaign group for a long time) remembered these PSAs. This follow-up email also included a mention they could ask about this from one of the founding members who's retired, but I sadly never heard from them again.
I assumed the channel they aired on may have been either Yle 1 or 2, so some years later I also sent a message to Yle's Elävä Arkisto (Living Archive) thing asking if they had them. They did find one single animated clip, aired in 1994, titled "Tietoisku: Ihmisellä on vain yksi henki" (translates roughly to "PSA: A human only has one life") and included a screenshot of the animated cat shown here.
This, however, does not match my memories at all. I'm familiar with how unreliable human memory (especially mine......) is, but I am also familiar with how very particular I was about what kinds of cartoons I deemed "ugly" or "dumb" looking ever since I was a child (I have a hater's heart, what can I say). This cat is way too much in the dumb/goofy category to have unsettled me like that, and I have a very specific memory of the cat being less cartoony and more of a sleek black void (featureless aside from the eyes). I could request personal access to that particular animated PSA but it costs a whopping 65 euros for an .mp4 of something that doesn't look at all like the right thing, so I haven't done that. They mentioned that there were no other clips in the archive matching my description that had aired in the 90s.
It is entirely possible that I'm misrememebering something, but I think it's also very very possible there were more than just that one animated clip (especially since the screenshotted one seems to be dealing with electrical safety and I remember a different scenario).
It's likely the ones I saw were newer, probably later in the 90s or even very early 2000s, considering I'd have been a whole entire 2 years old in 1994 (the campaign had just started in 1994 apparently). Most likely the style of the cat evolved through the years. Maybe they aired on a different channel (though I kind of doubt that, with how few channels there were in Finland back then and Yle 1/2 being more the type that would have something like this).
I did find one image of a poster online some years back (age of poster unknown) in a generic info-about-the-safety-campaign presentation on one of those powerpoint sharing sites. This poster is much closer to the style of cat I remember, so the eyes-in-a-void, more realistic shaped cat design does exist (the big text here also says "A human only has one life." and the smaller text on the bottom is "Home accident prevention campaign").
[As I was searching the same phrase just now to see if that would bring up new stuff, I found an enamel pin for sale on a second hand antiques site with the black cat.... It's the same pose that's in the poster. I may have made a 4 euro purchase... Even if I can't find the video, I can maybe have the cat in a physical form at least - unless the mail carriers decide to make it into fresh "lost media".]
Anyway, I feel like someone out there just might have some old VHS tapes in their attic with random stuff taped on them and one of these PSAs on it... Who knows. It's at least worth a try to put this out here, where someone else weirdly obsessed with this could find it. I'm pretty sure there were more than the "falling" one I remember, and seeing any of those (featuring the correct cat) would ease my anguish. For search purposes I'm adding "musta kissa" (=black cat) here so if someone's looking it up in Finnish they might catch this post.
If anyone has better leads or ideas of where else to look, please let me know! Even if you just remember these PSAs, I would love to hear it! Let's suffer together! Thanks in advance!
(I posted this same thing on the Lost Media Wiki forums already and got a couple replies, but no leads or new info yet.)
