I didn’t get into the Navy because of a high school skiing injury; but I have dad’s 8mm films.
It opens with people dressed backwards. IIRC, dad was in khakis, epaulets and the – what do you call the covers? White one for whites, khaki one for khakis? The chaplain was also dressed backwards, but he’d taken the cover off of his cover so that it looked like a halo. Then it shows everyone in two lines, dressed in skivvies or boxers and T-shirts. Dad said that they were supposed to should, ‘Hail Davy Jones!’; but dad was yelling ‘To Hell with Davy Jones!’ The footage shows the Shellbacks going down the line listening to people. They caught dad, and he got some special treatment later.
‘Special treatment’ meant that he got a raw egg in his mouth. As the Polliwogs crawled along, getting occasional taps of the ‘shillelagh’ (a brine-soaked piece of fire hose that abrades the skin and lets the salt in at the slightest tap), dad would occasionally meet a Shellback who would hit him in the jaw. ‘Oh, I broke your egg! Here’s another one!’ (Incidentally, I never saw dad in the initation part of the film.)
Other antics included Kissing The Royal Baby. This was the fattest guy on the ship, with alum smeared all over his stomach. The Polliwogs had to kiss his belly. There was some revenge, though. Initiates were allowed to not shave before the initation, and they would drag their stubble across the Royal Baby’s belly. Dad said they wore out three Royal Babies that day.
Haircuts. Guys would have a lock of hair cut off and put into their mouths; then they were tipped backwards into a pool. Shellbacks would yell, ‘Are you a Shellback?’ No matter what the answer, the recent barbershop customer would get shoved under water.
There was one bit where a raw oyster was shoved down Polliwogs’s throats, then pulled back up with a string so it could be used on the next guy. Dad’s footage shows the oyster come back up on its own.
The Coffin was a wooden chest with a hole at each end. The unlucky Polliwog is locked in, and a firehose shoots water into one of the holes, and the water goes out the other. Dad said there’s about three inches of air in the box, so you can breath. Still, some guys lost it.
There were pillories where men were hit with shillelaghs.
And then there was the garbage shoot. Dad said they saved the ship’s garbage for a couple of weeks so that it was nice and ripe. The shoots were so narrow that you had to slide through at the middle. He said that the first guys were lucky, since they only had to slide through garbage. Later entries had to slide through the vomit as well.
After the fun and games on the Equator, the footage shifts to wargames. There’s a shot of a destroyer pounding through the swells. Dad got some good footage (shot at 64 fps) of a Talos missile being launched. (His ship was CLG-5 USS Oklahoma City, a Boston Class light cruiser fitted with Talos surface-to-air missiles.) The missile flies up and brings down a drone.
Dad was commissioned in 1956. In this film he is a Lieutenant (O-3), so it must have been in the early-1960s. Back then they didn’t have the sophistcated recon cameras we have today. Reconnaissance aircraft apparently flew with their cameras running, and released flash bombs to illuminate the area. (I remember these from the openning of the NAS Miramar airshows in the early-1970s.) During the day, these left a circular line of little puffy white smoke clouds as the aircraft performed a loop.
Dad was in the Army Signal Corps before he joined the Navy. (Two years in the army, and 20 years in the Navy.) He was the communications officer on CLG-5. At the end of the film, dad pulls out a pair of semiphore flags and spells T-H-E - - E-N-D. 
