Movie Review: The Educational Archives — Sex and Drugs
Well, I’ve been wanting to watch these for awhile…there’s more in the series too, including a political set that includes the film Red Menace (which I have somewhere in VHS). Communists take over the U.S. while a man sleeps…the acting is so bad it’s funny.
In these, the acting is still bad, as I expected…I had to watch in small doses, but the films from the 1940’s where actually easier to watch…slightly better acting, score, a plot, and scenery that often changed. the 1960’s special effects (regardless of the drug featured in the story) appeared to consist of classroom paint, oil and food coloring, along with some vanishing and distortion that may have been done with two cameras.
I became more interested as an anthropologist when I began to see the social customs mentioned in passing throughout some films. Much of the tone of the films from the 1960’s had actors posing common questions kids may have been thinking at the time — one with a rather stupid line at the end that they were all actors. Many times the current young adult society was ridiculed to make a point…because we all know that will convince kids not to use drugs and have sex.
Only children have dares, so of course a group of children are shown. In a hilarious example, a long-haired young man is shown talking quietly to a girl on a park bench — but the ever-present narrator informs us that this isn’t a real boy because you can barely tell him from a girl — and then goes on to demonstrate that real boys go out and do things like have rumbles in the park and drag race.
Hmmm…gee, talking to a girl, or engaging in fights and dangerous activity. This would really not be shown as an example today.
In another funny example from the 1940’s or 1950’s, social customs and gender roles are explored again. It has a woman playing baseball! This has a better narrator and, of all things, somewhat of a plot. The boy in this example has a single parent — a mother — and yet, heavens above, he can still go out and play with boys and girls and has no problem liking girls.
Never would have guessed. Having a single parent didn’t turn him into a sissy.
The girl, we are told, lives in a perfectly normal household — with two parents — though from the way the actors interact, like the Stepford Wives, it leads you to believe that the household isn’t normal at all.
In one 1960’s film, Sonny Bono, in an awful gold suit, tells students not to use drugs…because drugs are bad. Instead, they should smoke a cigarette…because, you know, cigarettes are what every adult influenced by advertising in the 1960’s was doing, so why shouldn’t you?
I half expected an advertisement for which type of cigarette, complete with brand name, like the film that was solely an ad for a pad company. Sadly, no luck.
The 1940’s film about syphillis, thankfully edited, attempted to tell people about getting treatment by repeatedly showing the type of injection they will get if they do. Oh, and although they show a younger American man coming in for treatment, their first example is an actor with an awful Italian accent.
Because, you know, all nations blamed syphillis on other nations…the French Disease, the Spanish Disease…Maybe they couldn’t resist putting a stereotype in.
Half the 1960’s films are so unbalanced as to appear to advocate for drug use. In another fabulous example of things that would never been shown to a classroom today, taking drugs is compared to playing Russian roulette — demonstrated no less.
Because you just can’t be a real man or woman until you’ve done things like, well, fought in a large group, drag raced in a group, or played with a loaded gun in a group…just so long as you don’t do drugs or sex in a group. 
Oh, and you can’t be a hippie either.
Some very interesting unintentional demonstrations exist in these films.
Also included is a film about how to teach “trainables” — a term I understood only through reading a previous 1970’s book about mental retardation, but which the film’s little title card explains. This film is interesting only for being a special ed film, and is the only film aimed at teaching teachers. In order to teach teachers, they must first make them comfortable saying slang words for body parts…which are written on a blackboard.
I think I might recall this from my own class, but I shudder to think about what may have occurred the next day or next week after this kind of thing was used in a special ed classroom.
The film was done in the 1970’s, possibly when institutions were closing, and as such, all the developmentally disabled students are adults…even when they’re supposed to be young adults. Coming from, I assume, little instruction, sex education would have been necessary, but it’s rather funny to watch someone who is, if not an adult, than a prematurely-old child, talking to a teacher about puberty.
These films were fun to look at socially. I don’t need to rent them again however.