Another of the Bell Systems educational films, it was directed by Frank Capra, starred Eddie Albert and was narrated by Lionel Barrymore. I first saw it when I was about 9 or 10 and LOVED it. I found it on YouTube a few years ago and rewatched it. Some of the science is outdated (obviously) and I had forgotten it opened and closed with biblical scriptures and religious references, but it was still an entertaining film.
We watched a lot of films but they were mostly forgettable educational films. Some of the more memorable ones:
4th grade: Johnny Tremain
5th grade: Lady in a Cage (don’t ask me why the fifth-grade teacher thought this was suitable for his students; he was a bit odd)
6th grade: The Red Balloon
Middle school music class: Fantasia (or part of it)
Junior high history class: 1776
High school history class: The Blue and the Gray (TV miniseries) and Gideon’s Trumpet
High school English class: The Ox-bow Incident and some version of Romeo and Juliet that definitely did not feature nudity.
High school gym class: Conan the Barbarian (don’t ask me why we watched this, but it sure beats playing dodgeball)
Bell Telephone made a series of these. They were some of our favorites to watch after school in the projector club room.
The Bell series was parodied in The President’s Analyst, but to avoid trademark issues (and to made it funnier), the Bell System was known as TPC (The Phone Company). TPC was a scary monopoly with uncanny powers, run by animatronic robots. Just like the real thing.
I remember some big assemblies during middle school during which Disney movies were shown on the original reels. One of these was The World’s Greatest Athlete and The Black Hole was another.
There was a social studies field trip to a theater for Ghandi.
I had to make up high school English during summer school for a couple of years. Second year was in a religious school closer to home, one day the teacher gave us a treat and brought in a TV/VCR combo and Tron.
I don’t remember the name, but in my elementary school they showed us a dental hygiene film that scared the bejeezus out of me. The crucial scene showed teeth being jackhammered by little demons. By that time I’d already had a couple of bad toothaches from abscessed teeth and the dam film gave me nightmares for a week. Some time later, I don’t remember if it was the same year, they showed it again. My mom wrote the school a note requesting that I be excused if the film were ever shown again.
We were supposed to be miserable while we learned, not entertained. In pursuit of that effect movies were not offered. A number of obscure documentaries were substituted for actual instruction if, perhaps, the teacher was ill and no one could be found to take his place.
But during several memorable years when I was in junior high, for two or three days they herded the whole high school into the gym, set up a projector and bombarded us with the most obscene death porn anyone can imagine. We saw bloody, broken and burnt bodies of all manner of people who had died in automobile accidents for the hour preceding lunch.
This was initiated for the purpose of making us all safe drivers.
The film was grainy and oddly colored which was sick-making all by itself. But what made the whole experience remarkable to me is their choice of the pre-lunch showing. It goes without saying that the lunch period of those days was, as a result, equally a colorful one.
As far as I know there were no parental complaints. That’s perhaps the biggest peculiarity of all. But we were a rough and rugged sort and only through suffering could we achieve wisdom.
I always wondered why I couldn’t go see “The Creature from the Black Lagoon.”
When I was in 9th grade, my teachers had this strange obsession with Avalon (we had English, History, Journalism, and TV production in a block (it was a special Communication Arts magnet program)). We took 3 field trips to see it in the theater, and watched it at least once in class. It was the subject of multiple cross-discipline assignments and projects, analyzing just about everything about the film. It was (and still is) a good movie, but how there was that much educational value to it I still don’t see.
In addition to childhood classics like The Red Balloon and classic-classics like Romeo and Juliet ( Olivia Hussey nudity intact ), we especially watched a number of films on HS French classes. Younger-oriented films like La Boum or Truffaut’s Small Change, but also more adult fare like Diva ( brief nudity intact ) or La Balance.
The interesting thing about all of this was that our French teacher the first 2.5 years was kinda a standard-issue horndog. From photos of his garage it is clear that his preferred decoration for his man-cave was pretty much wall-to-wall Playboy centerfolds. He had no boundary issues with students or anything, but where it came into play was when he went into a young retirement from nervous exhaustion ( he was a new parent among other issues ). We got a hip young Moroccan-born substitute instructor to replace him for the last few months, but he still was in contact and supplied a couple of films from his large VCR library. Well, it appears he re-used tapes frequently, as we discovered when a French film ended and hardcore porn kicked in with a close-up of a blowjob :D. Our poor substitute was more than a little mortified.
I didn’t realize everyone saw “The Red Balloon” in school. I thought it was well known but rarely seen by anyone outside the foreign film crowd.
Was everyone except me taught balloon telekinesis in school?
If getting raped is the only way to teach that rape is bad, that class must have really sucked before they got the movie.
Women in swimwear, that’s why.
I don’t remember my schools showing us any commercial films. I remember my shop class showing us a biographical film on someone involved with steel or aluminum. My art class showed a cartoon on jealousy-a genie granted wishes for one person but gave twice the amount to his best friend-it ended with nuclear destruction. A health class showed a film where a teenage girl got pregnant by her class clown boyfriend-it ended with her telling him she was pregnant with a telephone call.
The closest we ever got to commercial films was when the class ahead of me in junior high wanted to see films in lieu of a class trip. They voted for Hitchcock’s “Psycho” and “The Birds”. The Harper Valley PTA went ballistic and them to change to a more appropriate film, “Father Goose”.
I’m pretty surprised by that too, since it’s not exactly a big crowd-pleaser or an “educational” movie. I guess it was shown so often because it’s pretty much the perfect length for a single class period?
I also remember that we watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in junior high, and the teacher fast-forwarded through the romantic scenes but apparently had no problem with us watching that one guy get his heart ripped out. :rolleyes:
Elementary school I remember seeing The Red Balloon and Oliver!
High school I don’t remember any but I’m sure I must have seen some.
College I watched Ironweed and The Accidental Tourist for a Contemporary Novel course.
Can’t forget Telezonia!
I went to grade school before D.A.R.E. existed, so the schools were pretty much on their own. We got a lot of sixties vintage drug scare movies. Pure hilarity!
I was lucky enough to get a little taste of the Catholic school experience in public school thanks to an insane 5th grade teacher who happened to be a former nun (word on the street was that she got knocked up while in college on the church’s dime). This woman was completely obsessed with the Our Lady of the Angels School fire 20 years previously. She would always try to make us feel guilty about it, and I distinctly remember her shouting “None of you deserve to live because those children died!” at us. So of course she shows a very graphic documentary about it, complete with charred children and nuns. To a bunch of ten year olds.
In HS the best ones I remember are One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest after we read the book, and The Gods Must Be Crazy to kill time at the end of the year.
Sonny Bono warns us kids about the dangers of . . . marijuana. We were in hysterics.
Anyone remember any good sex ed films?
My favorite, and one my friends and I still reference occasionally 20 years later, was Am I Normal? Absolutely hilarious.
Not a movie, but back in the 80s there was some traveling group that would show a video presentation with several clips from current movies. I believe there were three large screens on the stage where the and it would cut to each screen then the movie scenes would take up all three. Though it also could have just been one and I am miss remembering.
The one scene I remember was from Star Trek 2 The Wrath of Khan. It was the scene where Kirk is bargaining for more time to send the information on Genesis after Khan’s attack. Khan says that time is the one thing he does not have…
I have no idea what the point of this “show” was and I don’t recall if the group came more than once. While I enjoyed seeing the Star Trek scene during school time I believe even then I thought the thing was a waste of time.
San Francisco - the city that waits to die!
Scared the everlovin’ crap out of me (in a kitschy, motorcycle-ie, horned-rimmed glasses-ie, washed-out color 60s kind of way).
This is the one I was going to mention. We had to see it in 8th grade. If I remember correctly Sonny had a nice tumbler of scotch he was enjoying while talking to the audience. Good times. 
Wow. You missed out. In ninth grade English, we read R&J and got to watch the movie, complete with boobies. I nearly fell out of my chair. Boobs! At school! And they weren’t all wavy like on the scrambled cable channels at home.
I took a Film Study class in my senior year of high school (1977) and we watched several memorable films that I’d never seen before:
Citizen Kane
Mary, Queen of Scots
The Jetty (or La Jetée, the short film on which the much later Twelve Monkeys was based)
Frankenstein
The Lady Vanishes
Dead of Night
Saboteur
Picnic