About

Seymour Smoke Detector is a fictional, anthropomorphic smoke detector voiced by Gilbert Gottfried in a fire safety video titled, "Be Cool About Fire Safety" that premiered in 1996. The videos depict various home fire situations, and Seymour Smoke Detector teaching children about how to properly deal with them. According to the "Be Cool About Fire Safety" IMDB^[1] page, Seymour's name is properly spelled "Seemore Fire," a play on words, however, this spelling has mostly been lost to time. The character and associated fire safety videos have been the subject of jokes and video edits as far back as 2008.

Origin

In 1996, Allstate Insurance released "Be Cool About Fire Safety," a fire safety video made to teach kids the importance of fire safety (shown below, re-uploaded to YouTube^[2]). The full video, which comes in at around 19 minutes long, features two anthropomorphic characters that teach kids lessons about fire safety: José Hydrant, a fire hydrant, and Seymour Smoke, a smoke detector voiced by Gilbert Gottfried. Other notable celebrity appearances include a young Lindsay Lohan, Michael Winslow, and Little Richard as himself.

On April 21st, 2007, Entertainment Geekly uploaded a portion of "Be Cool About Fire Safety" featuring Seymour Fire to their YouTube channel,^[3] garnering over 48,000 views in 13 years. On August 28th, 2008, YouTuber^[4] SteamOmac uploaded a video titled, "Seymour Smoke Suffocates to Unfitting Disco Music" in which a looped clip of Seymour Smoke coughing plays over "A Fifth of Beethoven" by Walter Murphy^[5] (shown below). This is one of the earliest known memes featuring Seymour Smoke.

In 2000, Allstate Insurance released another fire safety PSA video, "Let's Rap Fire Safety," featuring a CGI animated Seymour Fire, this time voiced by Jason Alexander of Seinfeld fame.^[10] The full video was uploaded to YouTube^[11] on April 29th, 2020 by reelblack, but has not been the subject of jokes like Gottfried's Seymour Smoke.

Spread

On October 8th, 2009, YouTuber MaybePotatoes uploaded a video titled "sEeMOAR sMoAk" to their channel^[6] (shown below, left). The video features a screenshot of Seymour Smoke edited in various absurd ways, as well as a video of Seymour screaming, edited in a manner similar to ear rape videos. MaybePotatoes uploaded a sequel to this video, titled, "sEeMOAR sMoAk TwO" to YouTube^[7] on March 25th, 2011 (shown below, right).

On May 21st, 2016, stxpjoe uploaded a video edit to Vine^[8] featuring a clip of Seymour Smoke making a strained grunting sound, garnering over 5.8 million loops, 119,000 likes, and 55,000 revines before the platform's retirement. The video was re-uploaded to YouTube^[9] on May 29th, garnering over 222,700 views in 4 years (shown below). This scene is the subject of many memes featuring Seymour Smoke, with the sound Seymour makes being replaced with something else.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References