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Mental Hygiene: Better Living Through Classroom Films 1945-1970 Paperback – November 19, 1999
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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.
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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 length240 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBlast Books
- Publication dateNovember 19, 1999
- Dimensions7.25 x 0.75 x 10.25 inches
- ISBN-100922233217
- ISBN-13978-0922233212
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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
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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.
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.
- 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!
