I seem to remember something along these lines. I don’t remember Scott Baio, specifically, but it seemed at the time (late 80s?) that diving into unfilled pools was all the rage amongst drunk kids. There were anti-drinking TV commercials featuring it, school videos, and I think we even had a guest speaker come give a spiel at a school assembly.
Wolf_meister, the Duck and Cover may seem useless, but when a fresh coat of paint is all that’s needed to save your home from destruction, surely ducking and covering will help, too. Right?
Baio was in a movie called [/url=“http://us.imdb.com/Title?0080467”]The Boy Who Drank Too Much, but there seem to be no pools involved (it’s more of a “Don’t Drink & Drive” thing, like another Baio film, [/url=“http://us.imdb.com/Title?0337816”]All the Kids Do It. However, he was also in [/url=“http://us.imdb.com/Title?0286988”]Stoned, so maybe that has the scene you’re thinking of.
Baio was in a movie called The Boy Who Drank Too Much, but there seem to be no pools involved (it’s more of a “Don’t Drink & Drive” thing, like another Baio film, All the Kids Do It. However, he was also in Stoned, so maybe that has the scene you’re thinking of.
I remember one anti pot movie which was hosted either by Sonny and Cher or Donny and Marie Osmond and which featured supposedly true footage of a pot smoker in Nigeria being executed (bullet to the back of the head.) The same movie had footage of a man having a bad “trip” while on mary joanna and hallucinating that he had turned into a terrible monster.
It didn’t stop my middle school from being dope central.
There was also a film about a superhero called Hemo the Magnificent–I guess he was a red blood cell, as the film was about the circulatory system. And there was a film made by the same company (possibly Disney?) where all the ancient weather gods, including mighty Thor, lost their jobs or were debunked as a scientist explained what really caused the weather. It was really sad to see Thor realize that he wasn’t the one who caused lightning. Guess I just have a soft spot for those Nordic gods.
Sounds like a faulty memory of V.D. Attack Plan, which was a 1973 Disney animated film about VD. (Ahh sweet youth, when all we had to worry about were gonorreah and syphillis. At least they didn’t kill you). No Mickey and Minnie that I can recall. Just an animated spirochete briefing the Contagion Corp, complete with shock cuts to full color photos of sores.
I liked the really cheesy childbirth film we got in High School biology. Apparently the school district was too cheap to get any Miracle of Life kind of film. Instead, we got a 1950s Civil Defense film on how to deliver a baby while trapped in your backyard bomb shelter and unable to access medical care.
Can any ID this one (also from Biology class)? It was a 2 reel 16 mm film. The first reel ends with slow-motion close ups of prarie dogs getting shot by ranchers. Not really sure what the point was or what the subject of the film was. My sister, who was 5 years older and went to a different high school in the same school district, also saw this one. So it was around in the late 70s-early 80s.
The army shows us all kinds of cautionary stuff, though I’ve yet to see an actual VD movie. Most of the material is about safely handling explosives and how not to get maimed by machinery and what to do if your buddy mishandles explosives and/or gets maimed by machinery, and so forth.
We were watching a particularly cinematic tour-de-force (as it were) about people who mishandle thunderflashes and artillery simulators (those uber-firecracker toys that go “boom” during exercises and generally create hilarity). One enterprising but less-than-cautious soul held onto a thunderflash too long and lost some fingers, part of his hearing, his general composure, etc. and what was particularly tragic about this, the narrator told us, was that this man’s life was otherwise okey-dokey. He had, in fact, just started a new and glorious life-adventure by installing an 8-track player in his Trans-Am.
Well, all I remember is that the final scene of the movie was him diving off a diving board. At least I think it was the last scene - pretty sure it was. And he didn’t notice that it wasn’t filled because he was messed up on some foreign substance or another.
In the film - which probably was an ABC Afterschool Special - he was on the swim team.
Ah, The Amazing Mr. Hemo!
I’m pretty sure he was responsible for my slide into a life filled with various blood products.
There was another film from grade school, something about the history of science I think, that I vaguely remember. The only scene that I can distinctly recall was of an animated microbe, skipping across the screen chanting merrily “I’m a bug, I’m a germ.” Then he runs into a figure standing there and gasps in horror “Louis Pasteur!”
Holy Cow, I remember this one and I haven’t seen it in about 30 years!
True story: Third, maybe fourth grade in upstate New York, mid 1970s. They bring us all into the gym for a film. It was a film about school bus safety. It featured junior high and high school age actors. IIRC it had three short segments with kids acting up on the bus. One kid took a handful of unidentified pills. One kid had taken a knife on the bus to show his friends, other kids weren’t sitting down, etc, etc. Each segment ended with the bus getting in an accident, with what seemed to me at the time to be unbelievably bloody slo-motion sequences of what happened to the kids…the kid with the knife stabs one of his friends in the stomach as the bus careens out of control, blood spewing everywhere, etc.
Really, it was like that old Monty Python skit where the piano lid crashes down on the guys fingers and his hands are cut off with fountains of blood. Keep in mind, this school was K thru 4.
Needless to say a large chunk of the student body refused to get on the school bus the next morning. After many phone calls from apoplectic parents the new Secretary of Transportation for the School District, whose bright idea it had been to show this rather intense film to elementary school kids was informed his services would no longer be required. Less than 24 hours after screening the film.
In addition to the one, I’m still haunted by a film they showed us in kindergarten (this was in 1967). Apparently, in northeast Ohio, there had been some child abudctions, because about this time they started distributing signs – stop-sign shaped in orange, with a child’s hand reaching for an adult – to indicate a safe home to flee to if you’re chased by a stranger.
Anyway, one day, they marched us to the gym and showed us a movie about two girls who were abducted by a Stranger. Near the end, one of the girls breaks away and hides in a concrete drain pipe. The Stranger, dragging the other girl with him, runs down the slope, and as he approaches the drain pipe, the girl SCREAMS.
At that point, the person operating the projector put her hand over the lens, but the narration went on about how they found the girls’ later.
I credit this moment with converting me to a mystery/true crime reader, not to mention always going to bed with the nightlight on. In case the Stranger comes.
I saw a sex ed film in high school (mid 90’s) featuring the comedian Sinbad as a giant, talking, condom. I’ll never forget that.
Another great one we were shown in hs was older, like 80’s I’d say, about the dangers of drugs, alcohol, and sex. It was hilarious, one segment was a little boy who does crack at a friend’s house ONCE and then promtly dies at the dinner table. Another segment was about a girl at a party who is dancing with this one guy, the guy is wearing cologne. Her friends all warn her about him…“you KNOW what they say about guys who wear cologne!” and I guess ehe ends up sleeping with him and then pregnant or something. I still haven’t the slightest idea what they say about guys who wear cologne…anyone know?
In elementary school (80’s) I saw a great one about recycling where a boy breaks the point on his pencil and throws it in the garbage, only to be visited by a singing and dancing garbage man who takes the boy to a recycling plant. At the end, the boy realizes that instead of thrwoing his pencil away, he could have simple SHARPENED it!
School films are great. I’ve seen the older ones on mst3k, they’re insane and I can imagine how anyone in school watching those must have laughed. I think they need to make a collection of educational films and sell them.
The duck and cover maneuver was not intended to protect people in the direct hit zone of an atomic bomb, but rather those at a sufficient distance from the epicenter where most of the injuries would be from broken window glass and falling ceilings, walls, and light fixtures.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I think I saw this film when I was in the fifth or sixth grade. I remember one of the segments involved some kid who dangled a white mouse in front of a female busdriver who–like all woman do–passes out. The now-driverless bus goes off the road, off a cliff, and into a lake where, in the next scene, a diver says something about there being no survivors. As I recall, everyone in the class thought the movie was over-the-top.
Mental Hygeine: Classroom Films 1945-1970 by Ken Smith is an excellent book on the subject. It gives plot lines and analysis of over 100 such films. It’s a highly enjoyable read.
