So, what movies or TV shows (in any format) did you watch in school? School being anything from elementary all the way to college. These are what I can remember, so probably missing some. The one’s I can’t remember the title of I wrote a description of what I remember about it.
Elementary School (K-5)
Ichabod and Mr Toad
The Magic School Bus
Reading Rainbow
Something were a boy falls down a hill and dies.
Bill Nye the Science Guy
Alvin and the Chipmunks meet Frankenstein
A weird CGI thing that was like a screen saver on acid (not the Minds Eye series).
A safety PSA about electricity.
Mid/Jr High (6-8th grade)
Remember the Titans
Romeo and Juliet
Several docudramas about the lives of various artists and composers.
Of Mice and Men
Something about a girl that plays basketball and gets injured.
The Diary of Anne Frank
High School (9th-12th grade)
Radio
Hamlet
The Lion King
Cars
The Odyssey
Some movie about British kids and money.
Documentary about Edgar Allan Poe.
Frankenstein (the '90s version)
Pay it Forward
Schindler’s List
Amazing Grace
Two of the School House Rock shorts.
Donald in Math land (?)
The only “entertainment” ones I remember from school (as opposed to “educational” ones) would be 1940s Superman cartoons that we studied in World Politics class in high school. They might not seem applicable to world politics, but we were studying the geopolitics of WWII, and one of the cartoons was “Superman vs. the Japoteurs.”
There were no entertainment films in my undergraduate years, except for my course in Cinema Studies: Citizen Kane, Intolerance, In Which We Serve, Triumph of the Will, Battleship Potemkin, and so on.
In law school, however, I can remember a number:
– The Castle
– To Kill a Mockingbird
– Inherit the Wind
– The Verdict
– My Cousin Vinny
There were also excerpts from (IIRC) Body Heat (regarding the rule against perpetuities), and a “Judge Judy” show involving the law of fixtures.
At the moment I can’t recall watching anything in school after maybe 7th grade, but the ones I remember are:
The Red Balloon
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Some Disney movie with Jiminy Cricket (may be the same one as TLOSH?)
Some Disney(?) movie about a boy and a raccoon that kept stealing eggs from his grandfather’s hen house
Murder by Death
I know there’s got to be many more and I can’t seem to bring them to mind. Maybe others’ recollections will jog my own since I think some films were shown in all the schools. I mean, who *hasn’t *seen The Red Balloon?
It was an annual occurrence in grade school for a while to have a school-wide showing of Paddle to the Sea.
In what was likely 1972, we all got bussed to Oshkosh to see 1776 in a theater. I guess the administration thought it was educational. I learned something that day - I never knew our founding fathers could sing so well!
In K-12, I can’t remember anything on TV in a classroom context other than an occasional TV show from the brand new PBS station (new because you needed cable to get it). They did put the 1969 World Series on in the auditorium so students could watch in the study hall (this was before World Series night games).
In college, I took a course in Ingmar Bergman’s films and saw 19 of them. Other than that, I can’t recall anything.
Grade school: several of Disney’s educational shorts to which I don’t recall the title.
My middle school had an annual end-of-year thing where everybody (students and staff) gathered in the auditorium for a movie. One year was The World’s Greatest Athlete and another was The Black Hole. Don’t recall the third.
High school, Freshman English: To Build a Fire and probably one or two other things I can’t recall.
Retaking a semester of Junior English in summer school: Tron. I think the teacher didn’t feel like doing anything that day.
I’m sure we watched some in my grade school (1979-87), but I’m not recalling them at the moment. In high school, one of my classes went to the theater to watch the Mel Gibson version of Hamlet. In my senior year, our English teacher showed Deliverance since we were reading the novel. Same year, our History teacher showed Glory, but I was out sick those days.
Then there was Father Moellering (whose name I’m probably misspelling), senior year religion. He showed a movie literally every day. He was approximately 700 years old. He might lecture for a few minutes, usually to criticize non-Catholic religions, but otherwise he just hit Play and sat behind his desk. I remember none of the movies except for the one where a group of kids were in a car wreck or something and went to hell because they hadn’t told their friends about Jesus. It was pretty scary. The kids were all tossed in dark cells by some kind of demons IIRC, and you just heard them screaming as the movie went to its final fade out.
Oh, and I watched a movie about the Milgram experiment in one class. That might have been Fr. Moellering’s class, come to think of it.
Several Readers Digest films. (“I am Joe’s Heart”, “I am Joe’s Lung”, etc.)
When studying Romeo and Juliet, we watched the Franco Zefferelli film.
When studying Edgar Allen Poe, we watched a film version of The Fall of the House of Usher. The screenplay had been done by Isaac Asimov. In addition to the film itself, there was a “documentary” in which Asimov discussed how he adapted Poe’s story from print to cinema.
When studying Moby Dick, we watched the John Huston film. (Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab.)
About once a semester, my high school Spanish teacher would show an old movie to the class. I saw Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and Buster Keaton’s The General.
We watched mainly educational films, although I don’t know if they were part of a series. More often,m we had filmstrips (a series of projected stills from a coil of film, shown to the accompaniment of a recording that told you when to change the picture (BING!))
Pepper Mill is a substitute teacher, and I’m amazed at how often they shows DVD movies in class. To the best of my recollection, I only saw three commercial films at school during school hours:
The Buccaneer (1958)-- historical biopic of Andrew Jackson (Charlton Heston) and Jean laFitte (Yull Brynner, with hair). I have no idea why the Nuns of St. Mary’s broke with their usual traditions and shepherded everyone into the auditorium to watch this. Maybe someone loaned them the film for free. It was hard to watch, because the shades they pulled over the windows didn’t stop the light from coming in, and the screen was pretty washed out. Then the film broke, and we never did see the end. the nuns berated us over this, saying that all we really wanted to do was watch things like The Three Stooges.
Lonely are the Brave (1962) – Again, I don’t know why they showed us this oner. One fine day they convened all my high school in the auditorium to watch this. At least the high school auditorium had no windows, so you could see the film. The film didn’t break, so we got to see the whole thing. I still think I’d have been happier watching the Three Stooges.
On the Waterfront (1954) – We watched this in one of my high school English classes, and this time I know the reason – we were analyzing it. Good film, but not one of my favorites. We got to heat Marlon Brando make his famous “I Coulda been a contendah” speech.
One time we saw a film during my elementary school years during school hours, but not in the school building. They marched us to the local theater a couple of blocks away to watch the Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima (1952). Hey, it was a Catholic school. At least the screen wasn’t washjed out by sunlight.
I also remember Free To Be You and Me being a favorite when I was in 1st through maybe 3rd or 4th grade. We saw a lot of Mulligan Stew (https://youtu.be/634-QuYgfMI) also.
In third grade Spanish we watched La Puerta Abierta (the open door) which I assume was a show. Mostly we had educational filmstrips, which doesn’t count, I think.
In college though I didn’t have any movies a film class showed theirs in a big lecture hall, open to the public, and on Sunday nights. I saw “Don’t Look Back” there.
My kids saw way too many movies in school, the only useful ones being Disney movies in German in German class.
I graduated from high school in 1981. In the early days of VCRs, we watched a TV movie called “A Shining Season” in psychology class, and in journalism class, “we have to watch this dumb movie called ‘Citizen Kane’” which we all loved.
Being from an earlier generation, I saw precious little compared to the OP. There was Romeo and Juliet with Olivia Hussey. We all took school busses to the theater for that probably around 9th grade. And then in 12th in a crowded, darkened classroom we watched Little Big Man, still one of my favorites of all time.
Heresy! Crafted from an Edward Abbey novel, Kirk Douglas says it was his favorite. A cowboy that should have lived in an earlier time trying to hold on to what’s left of the real West. An awesome film. Try it again sometime.
[ul]Paddle To The Sea
[li]The Red Balloon[/li][li]Some movie about how beaches were made[/li][li]Some movie with some rugged dude who would show how pollution ruined nature. Example: he’d start to drink some clear stream water but suddenly the future had made it brown and gross[/li][li]16 In Webster Groves (because our Driver’s Ed teacher was in it, and Webster Groves was one or two towns over)[/li][li]Some movie about a woman who could drive a car with her feet[/li][li]Lots of Driver’s Ed car crash death movies[/li]Romeo And Juliet, the Zeffirelli one with actual nudity, which we absolutely did not handle like adults[/ul]
Sounds like Rascal, which is indeed a Disney flick. I saw it at the drive-in, though, not in school.
I saw it in kindergarten.
Hemo the Magnificent (mentioned by mbh) was the classic in my school system – I saw it at least three times over a six-year span.
Anyone else remember Cover to Cover, a PBS program in which the narrator drew scenes from the book as he reviewed Island of the Blue Dolphins or …And Now Miguel?
The only series I really remember watching was a TVO program called “All About You”. It was a lady teaching you how the human body works. We also watched “Read All About It” but I don’t remember much about that one and also one about some kid in WW1. I wish I could remember the name of that show because I really enjoyed it.
In high school we watched “A Tale of Two Cities” after reading the book in Grade 10. We also read “To Kill A Mockingbird” in Grade 9 or 10, but I don’t remember if I watched the movie in class or on my own.
In grade school in the mid-seventies the only thing I can remember watching on TV was PBS’ The Electric Company. Whenever I see Morgan Freeman I still think of him from this. We watched it live, on a B&W TV, no VCRs. Classroom stuff was still on projectors. In my first year of middle school they were still trying to push the metric system, so in Math class we watched this PBS kid’s show about it. It was a trippy mix of live action/animation (like Clutch Cargo) and featured superhero ‘Metric Man’ vs ‘Inchworm’. I’ve looked but can’t find any clips for it.
In junior high in the 70s we explicably saw a movie called Marooned, which was about a stranded spaceflight. All I can think is the teachers were burned out and ready for the school year to end.