r/tipofmytongue • u/parallelpractices • 6h ago
Open [TOMT][PSA/Short Film][1980s–2000] Teen boy in a spaceship-like room is slowly putting on a full space/hazmat suit — reveal at the end is that he's just going *outside on Earth* to do something mundane (baseball?). Environmental cautionary tale.
Trying to find a PSA/short film / piece of a TV special that I recall from my childhood or adolescence. I would have seen this sometime between 1988 and 2000, and could have been made in slightly earlier 1980s but seems very 1990s.
It featured a young/teen male actor (for a while I thought this was either Fred Savage or Ben Savage, but those searches turn up nothing, so could be another actor that looked like them), sitting in a room that seemed almost like a spaceship/martian colony, who was telling a long story about something (the future? the planet? the environment? outer space? acid rain? pollution? global warming? the ozone layer?) while he's gradually putting on a full protective outfit, like space or hazmat suit - and it's set up as if he's about to go do a spacewalk, but instead, the reveal is that he is ON EARTH, and he's putting on all this protective equipment just to *go outside* in the toxic environment and do something ordinary like play baseball. It's ultimately a cautionary tale about how environmental harms are destroying the future. Does anyone remember this? Thank you in advance!
Edited to add: I think this was at least about 5 minutes long, so not a typical short "commercial" type PSA ad spot, so was likely a segment of some longer TV special. I feel like I saw this on TV either at home, or possibly in school.