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Mental Hygiene: Better Living Through Classroom Films 1945-1970 Paperback – November 19, 1999

by Ken Smith (Author)

4.5 35 ratings

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Between 1945 and 1970, millions of public school students were subjected to hundreds of films designed to keep them on the straight and narrow. These cultural gems "enlightened" the nation's youth about proper dating, good table manners, the evils of dope, and what happens to teens who drive too fast on prom night.
Author Ken Smith embarked on an exhaustive nine-year search for these obscure educational films. The result is this fascinating stroll down memory lane. Smith has gathered titles such as Worth Waiting For, Posture Pals, Last Date, Highways of Agony, and Soapy the Germ Fighter. Included are interviews with writers and directors, detailed descriptions of these unintentionally hilarious films, and commentary on the social engineering behind them.

Amazon.com Review

In Mental Hygiene, Ken Smith takes a look at the endearingly gooney safety and "social guidance" films produced for classroom use between World War II and the early 1970s. Everything from dating to drugs to auto safety is covered in this lovingly compiled book. Smith even takes the time to discuss the stylistic differences of the various studios and analyze the peculiar obsessions of their auteurs. Though its subjects are bizarre ("Healthy Feet"), corny ("Teen Togs"), and often ineptly made ("Red Nightmare"), Mental Hygiene is no mere excuse to mock these films. Smith is careful to note bursts of good (or at least interesting) filmmaking and makes a convincing case that in their day these classroom movies were considered the new wave of liberal education. The films, catalogued at the end of the book, teeter between unintentionally hilarious ("More Dates for Kay") and just flat-out disturbing ("Boys Beware"). Most take the stance that teens who drive too fast or don't mind their manners deserve their horrific fates. For example, the auto safety films tend toward subtly titled epics like "Mechanized Death" and "Wheels of Tragedy," while the "image building" shorts mercilessly taunt their misfit protagonists. ("It's a little late for tears, isn't it, Barbara?") A thoroughly enjoyable read, Mental Hygiene is both funny and informative, but not so informative that it will put you to sleep in class. --Ali Davis

From Booklist

Among the most pervasive and pernicious forms of 1950s cultural indoctrination was the mental hygiene film, extolling proper behavior to captive audiences of schoolchildren. Blatantly and crudely designed, the genre's products instilled proper dating practices and showed the consequences of failing to avoid drugs and of car wrecks. No social problem was too big for them, not even juvenile delinquency and the atom bomb. Mostly, as Smith shows, they aimed to maintain conformity. Evolved from World War II training films, they flourished from 1945 to the early 1960s, when the growing sophistication of their target audience rendered them ineffective. Smith synopsizes well more than a hundred leading examples, from Act Your Age (1949), which offered tips on emotional development, to the seminal Youth in Crisis (1944), which exposed "the grim story of what the war is doing to America's youth!" Most mental hygiene films have vanished, discarded when their message grew dated, but they live again through Smith's diligent research and witty write-ups, more fun to read than watching them ever was. Gordon Flagg

Review

Social guidance films, the postwar spawn of progressive educators and Grade D auteurs, taught kids how to be popular and to say no, to think fast and to drive slowly. These beguiling curios have been fodder for documentaries ("The Atomic Cafe"), for compiliation reels ("Sex Hygiene Scare Films"), and for the canny gibe artists of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Now they've been rescued and reappraised by cultural critic Ken Smith in a droll, provocative study, Mental Hygiene: Classroom Films 1945-1970 (Blast Books).

There's nothing wrong with telling a kid to hang up his clothes or help with the dishes. But maybe the instructo-entertainment complex is better at teaching a child bad things (because they look cool) than good things (because they look drippy). After two decades of social indoctrination by classroom movies, kids were dressing more sloppily and taking more drugs. Instead of running for Student Council, they were protesting the Vietnam War.

Some children may never have considered slouching until Posture Pals told them not to. Did the mental hygiene cinema of the 1950s create the hippies and druggies of the 1960s?

Well, did it class? Let's discuss. -- Richard Corliss, Time Magazine, February 7, 2000

Print length

240 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Blast Books
Publication date

November 19, 1999
Dimensions

7.25 x 0.75 x 10.25 inches
ISBN-10

0922233217
ISBN-13

978-0922233212
See all details

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Blast Books; First Edition (November 19, 1999)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0922233217
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0922233212
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.59 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.25 x 0.75 x 10.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,533,182 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #177 in Documentary Movies
- #776 in Movie Guides & Reviews
- #807 in Medical Mental Illness

Customer Reviews:
4.5 35 ratings

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Molly McGee

Hilarious

Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2014

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The best way to use this book is to turn to the actual descriptions of the films in the second half of the book. Once you're finished either laughing or being horrified, go back to the beginning and read the history of the various low- budget production companies involved.

Subjects vary widely and include personal hygiene, dating, atomic bombs, and drug abuse. My favorite are the dating films. Boys wearing patent leather shoes, suits and neckties, looking like tiny Baptist ministers ask out girls wearing saddle shoes, long wool skirts, and fuzzy sweaters over white cotton shirts. Both go somewhere very public and follow many, many rules of etiquette, after which the boy drops the girl off at her front porch and...shakes her hand! They're so stiff and awkward, and hilarious.

The most disturbing one is about the duck-and-cover drills. My dad saw this film in school. You'd have to believe the filmmakers were either totally naive or just distributing government propaganda here. Is there any way the makers of this film really believed that putting a newspaper over your head or ducking under a blanket would really help if an atomic bomb went off in the vicinity? It seems likely the public believed it, which makes this gem all the more surreal- at once hilarious and terrifying.

Note that there are only small black-and-white pictures and lots of text, though the text does a really good job at describing the films. To get the full effect, I recommend the "shorts" dvds that are produced by MST3K or RiffTrax.

2 people found this helpful

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LM in DC

Hilarious treasure chest of AMerican camp!

Reviewed in the United States on November 12, 2000

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what a terrific book! I laughed, I cried, I spent the whole weekend reading aloud Ken Smith's synopses to my roommate.
I expected the book to make fun of the films and condemn the filmmakers' obvious authoritarian attempt to control teenagers. But in giving a social history of the films, Ken Smith actually paints a sympathetic picture, explaining that these films were made in an attempt to deal with postwar social turmoil and anxiety. He clearly thinks the films are funny as hell, but he also has a lot of respect for the filmmakers, and that comes through.
In the second half, he gives hilarious synopses of his favorites. This is clearly a man who devoted a lot of time and attention to his project. Not only does he spot returning actors, he even points out props that were re-used. This is truly an indispensible guide for any fan of these campy classics.
One correction (or update) to the book... Ken Smith writes that you can't see these films anywhere unless you go hunting for the original 16mm versions. I actually found a website that sells video compilations, including many of the films Smith mentions. if you do a Yahoo search on "mental hygiene films" you should turn it up fairly easily.
also, if you *do* want to track down the 16mm originals, they're available on online auction sites.

21 people found this helpful

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Elvis-from-Hell

Great but I wish there was more.

Reviewed in the United States on October 16, 2002

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As a connoisseur of vintage mental hygiene films, and driver's ed. scare films in particular, I found the back story about how these films got made both fascinating and engrossing. I especially enjoyed reading the story behind "Signal 30" (now widely considered to be the "Citizen Kane" of the driver's ed scare film genre). The only shortcoming of the book is that I wish there were reviews of more films. The author is upfront about not purporting to catalogue and review all such films (there are literally thousands of them) but I would have liked to see a more comprehensive treatment of the subject in order to help me track down the obscure gems still locked away in some high school janitor's broom closet. Could it be that I smell a sequel: "Mental Hygiene - Volume II???"

11 people found this helpful

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Chuck Donegan

A most unusual, yet fascinating, film history book!

Reviewed in the United States on October 11, 2010

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Ken Smith has offered a fine chronicle on the history of a unique-for-its-time learning device: the educational film. Once regarded w/suspicion by conservative school authorities, the post-WWII years changed all that and showed just what an effective tool it really was, leading to a boom in this one-of-a-kind "genre" that lasted about 25 years, and Smith has really done his homework here, viewing countless films and offering some fascinating information. Highlights include:

- The rise and fall of the 2 biggest educational film studios, Coronet and Centron
- A bio of the largest independent educational producer, Sid Davis
- Mini-summaries of more than 150 films

One highlight comes in the opening "primer", when Smith laments that "neither the public archives nor the private footage libraries seem inclined to release these films for viewing, but perhaps this will change" (remember, this book was written in 1999). And change it has, thanks to video sharing sites like YouTube, Google Video, the Internet Archive, etc...they've given new life to these films and provided them w/a whole new audience!

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J. Collins

Funny, but also a good ancedotal social history of the 50's

Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2000

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I have to confess: I did not read this book because I'm interested in the social mores of the late 40's-50's. I read it because of these shorts being shown on Mystery Science Theater 3000. (Oh yeah, I also suffered through some of these as a tail-end baby boomer.) The author matches the history of "Mental Hygiene" films and studios with the ongoing social concerns of the time. As you might guess this would be the 50's; the golden age of educational shorts. The underlying emphases on conformity and consumption are well illustrated, but the counterculture influence in the shorts of the late 60's/70's is criticized as well. The book also has "plot" summaries for many of the films mentioned as examples in the narrative. The downside for me was none of the educational films done by Dr Frank Baxter are in the book. His monotonal "Roll Five Bill" and anthropomorphic manifestations of FUSION and "Hemo" still haunt any kid from Utah in the early 70's...

5 people found this helpful

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John E. Palmer

An OK read... wish I hadn't spent ...

Reviewed in the United States on July 31, 2015

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An OK read...wish I hadn't spent the money on it, though.

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