Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Learn Your Lesson... 2 Year Anniversary: Shockucation's Greatest Hits, the 25th 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 24 months of digging out the best and worst the archive has to offer, we are celebrating our 2 Year Anniversary with a sampler of all our favorite lessons thus far including sex, drugs, and the creepiest of creepy puppets. Get rappin' about fast food and vegetables in the gut-busting craptacular Fast Food: What's in it for You? (1988). Watch out for easy girls on the street, they just might be hankering to give you VD, in an itchy excerpt from our favorite syphilitic scare film, The Innocent Party (1958). Teen girls need to watch out for intruders, even when they inexplicably become your instructor of Self-Defense for Girls (1969). What better way to learn not to drink the poisons in your medicine cabinet than to have the bottles sing to you in the baffling mini-cartoon musical Sniffy Escapes Poisoning (1967). Or learn about poisons with Egbert, one puppet boy with a penchant for poisoning himself over and over again in Watch Out for Poison (1970s). And yet, the creepiest puppet award goes to the clown puppet that will turn you invisible to see all your long-suffering parents do for you in the comically-dubbed Parents: Who Needs Them? (1971). Mike Miller is a good Mormon Boy, but will he be lured by fast cars and wild women in the hilarious Measure of a Man (1962) from Mormon-mental hygiene pioneer Wetzel Whitaker. NFL great and needlepoint enthusiast Rosey Grier sings "It's Alright to Cry" from Free to Be...You and Me (1974) for all those boys questioning the masculinity of emotions. Three pubescent girls lament about their underdeveloped bodies in an uncomfortable musical number "The Itty Bitty Titty Committee" from Junior High School (1978). See historical women through the ages not-talk about their menstrual pains in the opening segment of Cramps! (1983). And even more surprises and snippets!
The Innocent Party (Color, 1959, excerpt)
The guilt-tripped noir-like shocker about a “dirty” girl and her hidden secret- VD! See what happens when she “gifts’ her boyfriend with it! A cool beatnik-jazz soundtrack highlights highlights this sordid tale produced by the Kansas State Board of Health!
Absolutely twisted animation featuring a troll-like little boy with a massive head who drags his sick dog Sniffy to the medicine cabinet. Once opened, the pills and syrups begin to sing and dance as they cheerfully tell the little boy to KEEP HIS GRUBBY LITTLE PAWS OFF or risk a painful overdose and death.
Measure of a Man (Color, 1962)
Nobody does a drinking and driving scare film quite like the Mormons! Mike Miller is a good boy with a thoughtful and anxious mother who is none too pleased that he's going out driving with bad boys Hal and Blaine. They love "wild" girls, fast cars and drinking beer; and everywhere they go, crazy New Orleans jazz underscores their every move. Will Mike be able to hold his own with their wild ways, even turn them around to his square way of thinking or will he be pressured into drinking and necking the night away? The interior monologues will leave you speechless with gems like "I wonder how come mothers know so much" and "I don't know much about wild girls... might be educational, though." Directed by Mormon-educational film pioneer Wetzel Whitaker, who worked as an animator for Di$ney for 20 years before becoming the director of the BYU Motion Picture Studio.
One for the schlock history books, this bizarro educational primer features one of the most disturbing and creepy puppets we've ever found within these walls. Little Jimmy is a careless, sloppy and ungrateful boy who can't see all that his long-suffering parents do for him. That is, until his disgusting clown puppet comes to life, waves his magic wand over the young boy's face as he sleeps (not creepy at all), and turns little Jimmy invisible until he learns a valuable lesson in gratitude.
One puppet family has a penchant for poisoning their young puppet son, Egbert. Poor Egbert has to be poisoned four times before his clueless parents finally decide to poison-proof their home.
Finding a dirth of positive, modern-thinking children’s literature and programming, Marlo Thomas (That Girl) set out to gather some of the biggest names at the time to teach the new generation of children about race and gender equality, caring, sharing, overcoming stereotypes, self-sufficiency, the validity of boys owning dolls, and the brotherhood of man. First a record, then a book, and in 1974, Free To Be You And Me became an Emmy-Winning television broadcast. With singing, dancing, cartoons and puppets! The magic of Free To Be You and Me was its effortless way of making heavy ideas of feminism, consumerism and understanding palatable and entertaining for children and adult-children alike.
For the Early Birds:
None for the Road (B+W, 1957)
"Jerry Landon is one of the types that experiments with drinking... The all-out type"
A good old-fashioned drunk driving scare film replete with a white-coater injecting lab rats with alcohol and making them do acrobatics! The story centers around 3 couples at a sock-hop; the girls are all drinking ginger ale, Keith has had a couple of beers and Jerry has been "holding down the fort" all night and gotten himself blotto. When he gets in a fight with his gal Eydie, Jerry storms off for his car. Can Keith catch up to him and make sure he makes it home alive, or will Keith's couple of beers mean the end for him and his passengers? See who makes it out alive!
About Oddball Films
Oddball films is the film component of Oddball Film+Video, a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Summer of Love, 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.