Their website is not much to look at, so you’d never know it, but The Academic Film Archive is the leading group dedicated to the preservation of all those ridiculous educational films from the 1950’s.
Full of simple words, short sentences, and corporate propaganda, these “educational films” have long since become outdated and relegated to dumpsters and dusty old school warehouses. Usually having fewer than ten words per sentence, they are now valued more for their cheesy entertainment and nostalgia than for their ability to shape young minds. Even so, the Academic Film Archive is trying to change all that. They’ve rescued thousands of 16mm reels and have been working with the Library of Congress to make a worldwide database of all the old educational movies they can find.
These days most school teachers don’t even know how to use a 16mm projector, but as sad as it is, these films were still being used for educational purposes up into the early 1990’s! I, myself, had to suffer through many of these films in school, and it’s simply amazing to me that our education system would use such obvious corporate and government propaganda to educate our children.
Take for instance “The Living Soil”, which was a film produced by Shell Oil Company in the 1960s to extol the virtues of pesticides. Using scary music and little words, children were brainwashed into thinking that their food supply was being saved by the benevolent Shell Oil Company. They were taught to trust these corporations and made to believe that they truly had their best interest at heart… Yeah right… Anyone remember DDT? I’d hope that we’re all smart enough now to realize that we can’t trust corporations to think much about anything other than their share holders and the bottom line.
Seriously though, I love these films. I even bought one on DVD a while back on drunk driving. I just have to keep picking my chin up off the floor from my constant amazement that these people were actually being serious when they made them.
