Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Learn Your Lesson's 3 Year Anniversary: Shockucation's Greatest Hits, the 36th in a monthly series of programs highlighting the most ridiculous, insane and camptastic educational films, mental hygiene primers and TV specials of the collection. After 3 years of digging out the best and worst the archive has to offer, we are celebrating our 3 Year Anniversary with a sampler of all our favorite lessons thus far including sex, drugs, enemas, talking cars, exploding dolls, choking babies, and the creepiest of creepy puppets. Find all about wet dreams and unexpected hard-ons in the outrageous male puberty primer Am I Normal? A Film about Male Puberty (1979). The US Navy gets unclassified and teaches you the ins and outs of Giving an Enema (1944). Watch out for those burning dolls and exploding refrigerators in GE's explosive safety film Chemical Booby Traps (1959). See how Barbara loses friends by being a pushy, mouthy scalawag, maybe reading a book from the library can give her better Manners in Public (1958) and more square friends. Get ready for one swingin' party with The Munchers (1973), a groovy oral hygiene rock opera featuring a mouthy bandstand of claymation teeth. Jimmy dreams of overbearing anthropomorphic automobiles in the surreal The Talking Car (1969). Plus, the triumphant return of Gooney and Herky, the ugliest most belligerent puppets ever in Feelings: Don't Stay Mad (1972). Plus, musical numbers from Free to Be... You and Me (1974) and Junior High School (1978), and for the early birds a predatory scare film: Meeting Strangers: Red Light, Green Light (1969). It's an extra-special night to learn your lesson!
Admission: $10.00, Limited Seating, RSVP to: 415-558-8117 or RSVP@oddballfilm.com
Featuring:
Am I Normal? A Film about Male Puberty (Color, 1979)
"In this job I see a lot of penises"
It's the companion piece to Oddball favorite "Dear Diary: A Film about Female Puberty", but this one if all for the boys! Is it normal to think about sex all the time? Are these inexplicable hard-ons and nocturnal emissions just part of puberty, or are you some kind of freak? Are the other boys going through these same kinds of changes? Can you learn anything important from a book titled "Great Moments in Sex"? Find out all that and more when one pubescent boy dares ask every adult he knows "Am I Normal?" Well, Billy, the answer is yes and no...
Like the California Raisins of Oral Hygiene, The Munchers is a trippy, psychedelic rockucational film for all tastes. Dancing and singing on some kind of a mouthy bandstand, the Munchers fall victim to the Pusherman Jack Sweet, a masked demon that has an endless supply of delicious candy. Can the peg-legged, metal-skulled old toothman convince the young Munchers to stay clean and candy free? If not him, then maybe the conga-line of anthropomorphic healthy foods can do the trick.
Let's set sh*t on fire! This GE (General Electric - We Bring good things to life) industrial safety film shows you how NOT to store explosive chemicals - and what happens when you do! There are burning dolls, exploding sinks, mannequins and fridges and fires galore!
That They May Live (Color, 1959, excerpt)
From (of all places) the Saskatchewan College of Medicine comes this look at every conceivable scare story about loss of life. Babies choke on plastic, kids lock themselves into refrigerators and dinner guests choke. All this can be prevented by YOU!
Manners in Public (B+W, 1958)
Barbara is new in town and desperately wants to make a friend, although she's never had much luck in the past. The neighbors have a daughter around her age, maybe if they go to the movies, they will be fast friends. But when Barbara pushes some ladies, is too raucous on the bus and talks through the whole movie, the neighbor girl is not interested in a rude friend and shuns Barbara until she goes to the library and brushes up on her good manners. Barbara learns about good manners in public- on the sidewalk, on the bus, in the theater, in the store , and in the elevator. Now Barbara is a quiet, well-behaved girl, just like the system wants her to be. Directed by Herk Harvey (Carnival of Souls).
Meeting Strangers: Red Light, Green Light (Color, 1969)
Watch out for the "red light" people! Learn how to cross the street and how avoid the countless molesters that are constantly following you and your crew of tots in this ridiculous shock film for the grade-school set. A group of kids are just out for a stroll to see a movie, when they are beset by predator after predator, until each child has learned their lesson. Even includes a rare scene with a female pedophile.
Curator’s Biography
Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has programmed over 200 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.
About Oddball Films
Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.
Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.
