Is that the one where the boy falls on the axe at the end and dies? I saw that in the theater. All I remember other than that is the sugar daddy that got stuck in my hair that day.
I have a friend who collects those and other bizarre 50s instructional movies.
Mine is A Girl Named Sooner. They aired it a few years in a row back in the mid-70s. I always remember the scene where she’s having a party and she lets the school kids throw pebbles at her bird to try to make it fly until they eventually stone it to death.
Cloris Leachman played the Old Woman back then. She scared me so.
I later bought and read the book and was surprised that there were sex scenes in it. Scarred my poor adolescent brain to have that childhood memory changed. However, I find myself hankering to watch the movie/read the book again.
Thanks Slithy Tove. This has been haunting me for years. I’ve just watched the first two and a half minutes of it, and it is taking me back to that day. Were you shown this film as well, or do you just know obscure safety films?
When I was in 3rd grade (maybe 1986), it started snowing so bad that they decided to let us go early. While we were waiting for the busses to be called in (school was out in the country) we got to watch a movie! Yay! They showed us And Then It Happened about gory school bus accidents. It was terrifying, and a bunch of kids ended up crying and having to have their parents come get them.
One I remember that I haven’t been able to find since, is a filmstrip they showed us about the dangers of rabies. I was very young, like kindergarten or 1st grade, and I only remember flashes of it, but the end was a little boy laying in bed, all covered up with bandages as he screamed and thrashed around. He’d been bitten by a rabid dog and there was just nothing they could do . . . the beginnings of my life-long rabies phobia.
Your friend knows about the Prelinger Archive, right? That place is a treasure trove of old mental-hygiene films. I love them.
Oh, man, another childhood trauma movie you just brought back to mind. What is it with movies from that period that involved bullies killing pets? I’m so glad you don’t see much of that anymore–it really hit me hard when I was little (still does, actually).
Elementary School in Los Angeles in the '70’s. We saw Paddle to the Sea as well as The Red Balloon every year. As past of High School Driver’s Ed we saw Red Asphalt (Black and White) and Red Asphalt 2 in color.
Some movie about nuclear holocaust, produced by the BBC. I thought it was called “The Day After”, but this is definitely not the 1983 movie shown on US television.
Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times”.
I only remember seeing movies in 7th grade and up. I went to school in Indonesia and graduated from high school in 1980.
I saw The Wave in 4th grade, 5th grade, and again in 12th grade. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was just a “benign propaganda” mirror image of the mob mentality they were trying to warn against: “instead of being a Naziesque brainwashed robot like everyone else, be yourself…just like everyone else.” Also, our teacher got mad at the class for laughing at how overly-dramatic the teacher was in the climactic scene, but I challenge anyone not to laugh at that gem of overacting: “YOU WANT TO SEE YOUR LEADER??? THIS IS YOUR LEADER!!!”
Who was the guy with the organs painted out the outside of his body suit that you might sometimes see in videos in health class? I want to say it was “Mr. Goodbody” or something, but that name sounds even too ridiculous for the 80’s.
One of my teachers would sometimes let us watch her tapes of “In Search Of…” if we were really good. We also got Bob Ross in art class all the time. And, of course, who could forget Reading Rainbow?
I remember our high school showing a movie called “Phoebe”, which was about a high school girl who became pregnant by her boyfriend, and all the anguish that she and her mother went through. P:hoebe ended up getting married, but the movie left the question “will she or will she not have her baby?”
Another movie that I remember that was shown at a Pilgrim Fellowship meeting was called “The Game”, where a teenaged boy and a teenaged girl who were dating and petting, necking and making out constantly. The boyfriend came over to the house where the girl was babysitting one afternoon, and they began necking and making out on the couch of the house where the girl was babysitting. The parents of the kids that the teeaged girl was babysitting came home while she and her boyfriend were making out on their couch. Nobody knew what happened after that, but the movie left at least two questions: Should they or should they not have gone “all the way”?, and how did the parents of the kids that the teenaged girl was babysittiing for react? What did they do?
Another movie that was shown was a teenaged girl named Nikki and her boyfriend, who were dating, and, as their relationship became more sexual, one thing was clearly eminent; the boy planned to go as far as he could go, and then drop Nikki as soon as he “scored”. The name of this particular movie escapes me at this moment, however.
Might have been “The War Game”. This was a graphic-for-its-day quasi-documentary the BBC commissioned, and then decided was too grim to broadcast.
I remember a documentary about malaria and other parasitic diseases–why I was shown that in school in New Jersey, I couldn’t tell you, but it was certainly memorable, especially the elephantiasis and river blindness.
In high school we were treated to “Friendly Persuasion”, the drama about Quakers wrestling with their pacifist consciences during the American Civil War. This was a Quaker high school, I should explain.
