Inventing the Teenager with Harmony Colangelo

Where did all these teens come from? Harmony Colangelo, co-host of This Ends at Prom, is here to explain how, before Americans got to worry about what teenagers were up to, we first had to decide what they were—and how a boom in postwar educational films taught a generation of adolescents what not to do. Skipper Learns a Lesson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8kJzBJrOkU1950 Family Date: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8kJzBJrOkUMore about Harmony Colangelo:https://www.instagram.com/veloci_trap_torSupport You're Wrong About:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are GoodLinks: http://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpod Support the show Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Sarah Marshall?

  Why can't Molly be involved in code breaking for the Enigma Project or something? Because like, everyone else got to do something extremely relevant her moment in time.

• 0:22Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall, and today we're talking about the flower in the bread of any moral panic: the teenager. Our guest today is Harmony Colangelo. She's been on to talk with us about Tiny Tim, and of course, the Cleveland balloon disaster. Both great episodes. And today, we're talking about the post-war educational film and kind of the invention of the American teenager as a category. We haven't always had them. We've always had adolescents, but we haven't always had teens. Where did they come from? And why do we blame them for everything? Our April bonus, if you haven't heard it yet, is a newspapers.com choose your own adventure

• 1:07Sarah Marshall?

  with our dear friend of the show, Chelsea Weber-Smith. We both gave each other weird random words to search on newspapers.com. This is not an endorsement. We just like it and use it a lot. And we hunted up what we found when we searched for jawbones and jump ropes. And no bed knobs and broomsticks this time, but maybe next time. Thank you for being with us. Thank you for caring about teenagers with us. If you're a teenager, thank you for making it through and doing what you're doing. You're doing great, I promise. Adults are just projecting their fears about themselves onto you, I'm pretty

• 1:47Sarah Marshall?

  sure. And if you're a former teenager, congratulations. And if you're a future teenager, you'll love it. Thank you for being with us. Here is your episode.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  This boy and girl coming home from school look quite content with life. And why not? They're looking forward to an important date, dinner at home with the family. What's the matter? Doesn't that sound exciting to you? Well, to them, it's a special occasion, as it has been ever since they sat down to dinner in high chairs. Why should they feel that way about something you take so completely for granted? Well, let's see if we can find out.

• 2:45Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we were born to talk about moral panics and therefore we were born to talk about teens. And with me today is Harmony Colangelo, our Tiny Tim correspondent.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I have a wide range of things I know about. I know about large ukulele men, balloon disasters, and classroom films and teen culture.

• 3:09Sarah Marshall?

  What's the commonality here? There's something, but I can't put my finger on it. I hope I do by the end. But yeah, I guess you talk about sort of the American love of folly.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  Maybe just like this idea of novelty, like this very innocent way of novelty and a childlike wonder and how that goes wrong.

• 3:30Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, and I suspect that you're bringing back some of our ability to feel wonder about these things, too.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  I try.

• 3:37Sarah Marshall?

  Well, so we're talking today about a topic that we arrived at because we were talking about classroom films and educational films. And via that, arrived at the idea of what I think of as the invention of the American teenager, AKA, how long have we had teenagers for?

• 3:55Speaker 02

  I have a kind of short answer for that, which is the, pretty much when most things in America became as we know them now, which is World War II.

• 4:04Sarah Marshall?

  And that opens up a whole bunch of follow-up questions. But I also just, yeah, I want to talk about sort of your view of that through this type of media, like what you think it reveals and just, yeah, take us on what I suspect will be. A somewhat campy journey through the way Americans are being taught to see ourselves. And maybe like a good question too, because I guess this is two things, right? This is like, where did the teenager as a category come from? World War II, but then why did it come from that? What was going on in this period? And then what was the American short educational film? And what was that about?

• 4:45Speaker 02

  So, uh, the way that teenagers, uh, then at the time known as teen hyphen agers, you know, as, as a more broad, weirdly impersonal term.

• 4:55Sarah Marshall?

  Why must I be a teen hyphen ager in love famously?

• 4:59Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. So the reason that that exists in World War II as like the start of what we understand as teenagers is that dad was off fighting the Krauts and dying. And mom, when she wasn't painting, you know, lines up the back of her seams to, uh, up the backs of her legs to look like she has seams for her nylons that are also going to the war effort. She's wearing the pants in the family and building bombs. So that means that all of these teens and kids are kind of left unmonitored.

• 5:28Sarah Marshall?

  Like Molly, the American girl.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Yes, I, I take your word for that. I wouldn't know. Is that Molly's whole thing?

• 5:33Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, because it was World War II, so her dad was away. But the thing is that Molly just had like the boringest books because it was like, oh my God, Molly is gonna tap dance with her glasses off was like her big challenge. And it was like, why can't Molly be involved in code breaking for the Enigma project or something? Cause like everyone else got to do something extremely relevant to her moment in time.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  Teens can do anything. I believe in it. Teens can do anything, including being boring.

• 6:03Sarah Marshall?

  That's true. That's true. You make a good point.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Right. So, so the teens of World War II, not only are they coming out of the Great Depression and then going into World War II, which is obviously, uh, at the time, not a very good time for the United States economically. These kids have never known peace. They've never known anything.

• 6:22Sarah Marshall?

  All they've done is stockpiled rubber.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically. A lot of, a lot of child labor at the time. The New Deal would help put away with that and then also help make teens more of an established thing because they aren't having to work quite as hard to like the bone. They have a 40-hour work week for adults and a significantly reduced thing for minors. But that's where you get that. Eventually, once parents come back to like their normal states of being in America, mom goes back into the kitchen, often against her own will, and dad comes back from Europe.

• 6:53Sarah Marshall?

  With a bunch of stories he'll never tell to anyone until the day he dies.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  I'd like to think he swapped stories with his war buddies.

• 7:01Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  I've, I've seen King of the Hill. I know what Cotton Hill, Cotton Hill's whole deal is. Talk about killing fitty men.

• 7:08Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, it is because I, I know that there's like a lot of nuance to it and a lot of complexity, but it is a moment, I guess I broadly think about, um, whether this is an oversimplification or not, as like, American men coming home with a lot of trauma that there's just no way for the culture to address because they're like, everything's fine now. It's fine. It's fine.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  What, what did teen culture look like, you know, around World War II and therein? It was largely just teens trying to be adults. They just wanted to be little adults because they were largely influenced by the desire to have the freedoms of being like their parents or having the freedom that their parents have. And with that comes an interesting predicament because America has not necessarily become like an entertainment enterprise yet. We haven't had the money for it. Like there's, there's Hollywood, but the idea of like teen culture is generally viewed as vapid and based on excess to some degree. We're gonna eat too much sugar. We're gonna drive too fast. We're gonna have too much fun making

• 8:09Speaker 02

  out. Like, that is what teen culture largely is built on. And when you're in a war and an economic decline, you don't have that luxury. Uh, music doesn't, there, no such thing as teen music. There's no such thing as teen movies. There's no such thing as teen TV shows. So it's.

• 8:25Sarah Marshall?

  There's just big band music, which everyone is supposed to freak out to equally.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. So exactly, exactly that. So what did teen culture look like at the time? I don't know. What, what's that one? Bugsy Malone, where it's Jodie Foster in a gangster movie, but they're children? Kind of looks like that.

• 8:41Sarah Marshall?

  I, I used to believe that's the case.

• 8:45Sarah Marshall?

  Maybe an example of teen culture is the Andy Hardy movies, which were coming out through the late 30s and early 40s, which were Mickey Rooney is a prototypical teen who's like, I don't know, forever overlooked kind of love interest Monquet is played by Judy Garland. And they're not scary teenagers. They're cute little teenagers, you know? It's like a very neutered kind of picture of adolescence. And we're certainly not meant to feel threatened by these characters.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  No, I mean, that was also Hollywood's job was to give you that sense of escapism. You know, the idea of Wizard of Oz in general is that it's like, wow, the Dust Bowl sure is depressing. I really want to be anywhere else.

• 9:27Sarah Marshall?

  Even if there's witches, in fact, especially if there are.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Totally. So the idea of something being pleasant about kids kind of getting along and conforming and all of that, that is going to take quite a substantial direction post World War II. So World War II ends in September 1945 and classroom films as we know them start to really kick up in 46 and 47. There were educational films before that, but they were pretty sparse. This really picks up in a much more dramatic way because during World War II, we learned quite prominently from Germany that you can use film to do

• 10:11Speaker 02

  things like boost attitude. They were called attitude building films. And in 1944 alone, government films were shown more than 700,000 times to an estimated 67 and a half million people as a rapid way of conveying information about how to like clean your gun and apply a tourniquet and all of the things that you need to let all of the people involved in the war effort learn about their position as fast as humanly possible.

• 10:39Sarah Marshall?

  I guess if we must have government propaganda, I'd like it to be about tourniquets.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, see, that's useful information. Attitude building films are kind of just trying to not feel totally hopeless. And that is in of itself, not necessarily a bad thing. The idea of a classroom film. So there's a lot of, this is the core backbone of like, I want to talk about for teen culture because it eerily is the foundation that so much of it is built on. So these films covered literally anything you could ever possibly imagine, but for the sake of our conversation, we're going to be talking about the flexible genres of like, social guidance, life adjustment, and mental hygiene films.

• 11:21Sarah Marshall?

  Mental hygiene is a phrase that I've always found both delightful and creepy.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  It's very alarming. Like, the idea is that there were hygiene films where it's like, cool, here's how you brush your teeth. Here's how, you know, you take care of things during a woman's time of the month. Here's how you brush your hair. Normal, you know, things that you have to learn in order to be a hygienic person. It's like, well, we're going to keep you clean in the mind. Why these films are so interesting is they were very, very effective at doing what they did in the world war. And after they served their purpose there, the army had a huge surplus of tens of thousands of 16 millimeter projectors that they then donated to schools. So schools now have the means of showing films to people. The specific, in quotes, goal of this was to discover and derive principles for the scientific development of sound films for rapid mass learning.

• 12:10Sarah Marshall?

  Rapid mass learning. I like that. It sounds like a monorail.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  It does. There is something also alarming about it, much like the term mental hygiene itself, where I'm like, I don't like, like, it's so impersonal. It's such like, the stereotype of schools being like a conveyor belt to pump children along, teach them how to work a nine to five job, and then ship them off to a factory.

• 12:31Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And it's based on this creepy sense of Americans post-war being like, we've learned from the Nazis, and boy, are they efficient. And we also are going to see our populace as grist for some kind of economic mill. And it's like, you know, even if you're doing something less evil, which at this, you know, point, and many other points has been debatable, the way you talk about the subjects and the citizens of the country that you're running can be very revealing of what the, how you view your project, you know?

• 13:07Speaker 02

  It's very clinical.

• 13:08Sarah Marshall?

  And clinical, like the way you talk about a lab rat, kind of.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, like if it's not clinical, then it's not, doesn't feel like it's scientifically substantial enough to actually have merit, you know? Like, I feel like that's the approach a lot of people have.

• 13:22Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I can, I can see that certainly in this period, but then, but also the idea of like, you know, this being the period as well, when, you know, again, because of the events of World War II, American scientists and politicians and so on have had to stop being openly eugenicists, not because they've necessarily stopped thinking those things, but because we're like, oh, well.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  We gotta be better than the Nazis.

• 13:48Sarah Marshall?

  The Nazis made eugenics look really bad, so we're just gonna do it quietly now for a while, but like, you can see how the, you know, those ideas get slightly more covertly expressed in all kinds of racist ideology and alleged science and, you know, the next, you know, until now, as we can see.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  I mean, like, the idea of guidance and brainwashing and propaganda, all kind of like, just swim in the same pool, it's a matter of like, just intention. Did you have any of this, where you like, you had these classroom films you had to watch, or like, gory car accident videos, where you're just watching someone's head be scooped off the highway with a shovel? Was that a thing for you at all?

• 14:26Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, so I took like, a classroom driving class, because I was scared to death of driving, and I didn't get a license until I was in my mid twenties, because it just like, freaked me out so much. And so, I like, took a class to try and feel less freaked out about it, where they would like, I don't know, teach it to you through book learning, which was less scary to me as well. And I remember watching, like, something that, I think it was probably from the eighties, felt kind of early eighties, about this guy who drunk drives, and we know that his son has carved a jack-o'-lantern for him, and wants to show it to him, and he's like, "Boy, woo, I can't believe I made it home, it was a close call, but I did it."

• 15:09Sarah Marshall?

  And then he goes inside, and then we see that the jack-o'-lantern is smashed on the grill of the car, he ran over his little boy.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  No!

• 15:18Sarah Marshall?

  And I've never forgotten that stupid thing, because it's like, one of those things where like, even when you're seeing it, you're like, this is so cheesy and dumb, and also, oh my god, please god, don't let me do that.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's cheesy, but it was effective because now you at least have the fear of the consequences in mind, right?

• 15:36Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, it worked. It worked at the job it set out for itself.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, we were we were commiserating at work the other day about this kind of thing. And I was talking about how like before my senior prom, we got letters from like kindergarteners or first graders that was basically saying like, please don't drink and drive at prom. My dare cop said that you'll die and everyone will be sad and miss you. So you're getting like this crayon scribble from a child you've never met to feel bad.

• 16:04Sarah Marshall?

  I kind of think a very inappropriate thing to ask a little kid to do. I'm sure people more agree on that. I was I'm glad that it wasn't a little kid being like, please don't one me ovo. I have just started to live. I haven't even one cuss of yet.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  Right. Like, there's so many ways that I just feel like we manipulate children. Some of my coworkers are telling me something called like Angel Day or something where like someone plays the Grim Reaper and they just wander into classrooms and like tap a child's shoulder. And then that child has to leave class because now they're dead. And they were just taking kids out of classrooms throughout the whole day. And then at the end of the day, you go outside and like, everyone is like, there's like a fake car accident and they like tow truck in like a totaled car and just plop it in front of the in the front of the school. And just like, be like, look, here's gruesome death. All of your classmates could be dead just like this.

• 16:53Sarah Marshall?

  This is making me remember that when I took this class, we also watched a movie that I also still remember about teenagers, like going through the process of like, what would happen if they died because of drunk driving and like watching their parents have a funeral for them. And again, it's the kind of thing that when you're a teenager and you're like, feeling especially Donnie Darko about all these ridiculous things that adults are using to try and teach you. You're like, this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. But also secretly, it kind of makes me think, you know?

• 17:28Speaker 02

  I mean, it's the only information you have and you haven't quite figured out to the extent that like, yes, adults will lie to you.

• 17:33Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, the pumpkin thing I feel like was kind of a famous urban legend, or at least based on one that I kind of also heard going around at the time. So it's like adults using the kind of bluntest instrument they can use to try and communicate with adolescents. And as an adolescent, you're like, okay, I get it. My God, like, I understand you could be a little bit more subtle than this, but also you're like, but I still am kind of a dumb kid and this is gonna haunt me.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  Oh, there's, there's no room for subtlety. In the case of classroom films, they took one of two directions. One of them is like, you get these cautionary tale type gore films, and they have maybe 20 minutes max to convey a point to you. And the idea is if you, you know, go against the grain, if you become a beatnik, or a punk, or a floozy, then you will be punished for it because that's what morality is about. And, you know, if you want to fit in, you have to fit in. You can't act out. Like, that's, that's the whole mindset of these films. But where I find them to be most interesting is that fundamentally, these films are very important in the discussion of teen Canada and America, because it is

• 18:41Speaker 02

  actually the first time that teens' emotions were ever really acknowledged on a wide scale, certainly academically.

• 18:49Sarah Marshall?

  How depressing. And yet I'm like, yep, that feels right. Tell me more about that.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  Prior to, you know, the New Deal era liberals changing how education would function in this country, it was largely recitation. The teacher says something and you repeat it back at them, and then they just drill that into you until you retain the information. They don't necessarily explain the information. You just know that two plus two equals four, but you cannot figure out the math necessarily yourself. That's just how the teaching works.

• 19:18Sarah Marshall?

  I think this is how George Orwell talked about history being taught. Also, you know, different example, but in, in English, public schools, yeah.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  Oh, no, totally. I mean, I took social studies every year, I think I went to school. And for at least eight years in a row, we learned about World War II. And it was just like Nazis are bad. And it's like, okay, Nazis are bad. But like, they didn't really Go into detail enough about it. And clearly, a lot of people didn't learn enough that Nazis are bad.

• 19:43Sarah Marshall?

  Clearly not, or at least, you know, we didn't make enough cautionary films about it, or whatever works.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  No, we had to go rah rah rah, D-Day. We saved the day. Go, America.

• 19:55Sarah Marshall?

  Americans are good. Right. That's the lesson. Yeah. Not that, you know.

• 20:05Sarah Marshall?

  So teens emotions. Yeah. Tell me about that, because that is fascinating, because I feel like we have never fully acknowledged them. But at least there was a point when we kind of started trying.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  Right. So around this time, educators would learn that teens did actually like learn from each other. And it was not purely just being influenced by the adults in their lives.

• 20:25Sarah Marshall?

  Wow, they communicate. Incredible. They do move in herds.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  By using classroom films and actually having, you know, as as true to life as they can be, depictions of teen life in the 40s and the 50s. It's the first time teens would see themselves on screen by and large, certainly in a contemporary setting, as most Hollywood films often weren't. It was the first time they saw their day to day problems, because again, Hollywood was all about a lot of fantastical things, like rich people, rich situations, different places in time and fantasy. Like, that was an entirely completely different experience. It was something that was very, very relatable. Many of the filmmakers who made these movies genuinely did care about kids' emotions and feelings and try to give them guidance.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Because during this era, juvenile delinquency was seen as one of the biggest epidemics in America that we couldn't quite solve.

• 21:20Sarah Marshall?

  And what is juvenile delinquency, while we're on the subject?

• 21:23Speaker 02

  I mean, I think the idea is them just like not going to school is is the broad term. It's just them being a delinquent and not doing the things that they're supposed to be doing. But what the fear was, is that they're going to do drugs, women are going to get pregnant, they're going to get in car accidents. All these horrible things are going to happen to them, and they can't live a happy life as an American if they're dead.

• 21:45Sarah Marshall?

  I've heard that. Yeah. Although in Buffy, you know, they do challenge that premise a little.

• 21:53Sarah Marshall?

  Do teenagers at this period have a new level of freedom because of like the technologies of the time that allow them to be delinquent in ways that are more scary to adults? Do you think that's a factor?

• 22:06Speaker 02

  That is absolutely a factor. Thank you for asking. So in the wake of World War II, the economy is booming. The best thing to ever happen to America was World War II.

• 22:17Sarah Marshall?

  Nothing like taking out all the other economic superpowers at once, you know?

• 22:20Speaker 02

  Right? It just last man standing worked out really well for us from a financial standpoint.

• 22:26Sarah Marshall?

  Let's not think about the other standpoints too much.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  Precisely. So these teens who have never known or even heard tales of a time where they could not be in horrible financial ruin because of the war and the Great Depression are now experiencing the luxuries of the suburbs exploding. All of the teen families are moving off to these new developments and having these nice little homes far removed from the city, which is often the setting for all of these films.

• 22:53Sarah Marshall?

  Somewhere that's green, if you will.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 22:55Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  Somewhere that's green. So all of these classroom films take place out in the suburbs, a very Pleasantville type environment, a very Leave It To Beaver type environment because small town America is where, you know, the heart is. Because everyone has money, because everyone has a lot of freedom, mom and dad are able are able and expected to have a car. Kids are not necessarily forced to work jobs or work the farms to help take care of the family because everyone has a lot more money than they used to. Car manufacturers with the booming market of the automotive industry and the economy in general are building stronger and faster engines for their cars so that teens who have no concept of mortality are now going as fast as humanly possible and car accidents

• 23:41Speaker 02

  start to be on the rise. VD starts to rise despite the invention of penicillin. There are many things happening all at once and then as these incidences, as these travesties that are overtaking our use happen, we are coming up with films to try to fix that, either in a Positive way by being like, we're gonna teach you how to think about your about others and fit in and be a good kid. Or we're gonna try to scare you, much like movies started to do around this time. Quite frankly, you get a lot of these early teen films in the 50s, such as like, I was a teenage werewolf or whatnot, or

• 24:21Speaker 02

  The Ghost of Drag Stripalo, where teens did something they weren't supposed to do. And then they were greeted with horrors that are all their fault. And then hopefully they will get out alive.

• 24:31Sarah Marshall?

  And even on the music side, you know, Jan and Dean's Dead Man's Curve and all the great car crash pop songs.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  I mean, there was, there was also like rebellious stuff at the time. I believe there was Blackboard Jungle. Just between 53 and 55, you get The Wild Ones with Marlon Brando. You get Rebel Without a Cause. You get Blackboard Jungle, which is a huge box office's success and was, I believe, nearly banned. So there's that. But like,

• 24:56Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  I mean, there was also just the way that rock and roll ended up going in the latter half of the 1950s, where you have The Day the Music Died, where Ritchie Valens and Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper all died. Elvis got shipped off to war. Little Richard found God because he was living a sinful life. I think Chuck Berry got arrested. Jerry Lee Lewis was dating his cousin. I think they got married.

• 25:19Sarah Marshall?

  Al Green got grits thrown on him eventually. It's kind of a separate story, but I learned it from VH1's Most Shocking Moments in Rock. So it deserves to be in here.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  Of course, yes. So like, this is just examples of being like, look, this is everything that could go wrong in your life. If you listen to like this devil music that is rock and roll.

• 25:36Sarah Marshall?

  You know, in sort of what we made of the legacy of James Dean, this idea of the teen rebel death drive, you know, and that the idea of teenagers, even at this time, being aware of the allure of this figure being partly the idea of.

• 25:53Sarah Marshall?

  Let's literally live fast and die young because everything seems a little bit absurd. And also this idea of like suffering within affluence, which is interesting because as, as you said, it's affluence that has been brought about by the end of World War II and by the sense of, you know, adults have been through and done a lot of things that they're not going to tell us about. And we're all supposed to just enjoy our garages and lawns and things.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  There, there was so much to that, that like, what did kids have to be mad about? Like, you've got a roof over your head. I put food on the table. What are you upset about? Like, you have it better than I ever could have.

• 26:29Sarah Marshall?

  We're not having a Great Depression anymore. There's a chicken in the pot.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, it's arguably the best America's ever been. Like, you're upset for it?

• 26:38Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  I'll say that like, classroom films acknowledging teens' existence is fundamentally a good thing for acknowledging their feelings. Like, the idea of dating is a new concept during this era. And you see these stereotypes of like teens going out to make out point, or going to the soda shop, or the drive-in movie theater. And that is new freedom that is brought about by them not having to go work in a coal mine, or mom and dad having a little extra money and kind of loaned them the car for the night, or having a little pocket change to put some quarters in the jukebox. That is something that they're allowed to have and have a teen space to exist in.

• 27:17Sarah Marshall?

  It is so interesting, though, like, how much a relatively small amount of freedom brings in. Because obviously, cars are a big change, suburbs are a big change. But just the idea of like, the soda fountain, you know, or like, some small piece of geography that adolescents are supposed to socialize with each other at, like-

• 27:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a third space.

• 27:38Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And then, and also that, you know, any 50s nostalgia also is like so big on diners and soda shops because we understand that there needs to be a nexus for, for life to happen, for plots to happen.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, the equivalent that you would have is like, essentially, it's a teenage version of a bar, you know?

• 27:55Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  That's where all of the dads go when they need to unwind. If they don't go to like, the Elk Lodge, or the VFW, or what have you, they're going somewhere to drink. That's really just like what it's, the core of it is at. And this is the teen equivalent of that. And not a lot of adults hang out at the soda shop necessarily. That is a place for teens to be loud. And you don't want to be there because they're going to disrupt your meal.

• 28:18Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  I see, I've seen these educational films, which like- They're so silly where it's just like these things of like the, the boy has to come in and, you know, make sure you never sit before you shake the father's hand and make sure you communicate a proper time of where you're going and what the plans were and a reasonable time to be back with his daughter. And you need to be dressed up like you're going to winter formal. Like the, the way of dating as it's portrayed in these, these films, it almost feels like everyone's going to prom when they're not, because everything is like a much more formal form of dating.

• 28:51Sarah Marshall?

  You have to treat every day like prom.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I mean, the fashion, the dress up, like it was all way more detailed and complicated and formal than we expect. You know, t-shirts and jeans nowadays, though you certainly get a bit more of that. But those are like delinquents and punks. You don't want that. But like compared to the parents, like one of my favorite teen films of this era is, uh, is Gidget, which is a tremendously influential piece of teen cinema. She is trying to be set up on a date with one of her dad's like friend's kid.

• 29:21Sarah Marshall?

  Okay. I'm glad the word kid was at the end of that sentence. It was stressful for a second.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  It was not dad's friend. No, it was, it was his kid.

• 29:29Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, you never know, because there's also the bachelor and the bobby socks that were only a few years away from, uh, the unpleasantness.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  It was the fifties. Yeah. But it was like dad doesn't see anything wrong with like, you know, Gidget wants to go on dates with like the boys she's interested in. But dad's like, no, I hook you up with like my, my friend's kid. That's the way dating works, because that's the way dating used to work. You used to get like, girls would get like set on dates with people.

• 29:53Sarah Marshall?

  I decide who you mate with, Gidget.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And I think that that is just a fascinating evolution to look at that for why you so almost do need educational films to teach like the idea of what dating is now, because it isn't what it used to be.

• 30:09Sarah Marshall?

  Well, yeah. And I mean, it's interesting how, and this is a whole other topic really, but like, how recent is the concept of dating? And how long did it last for? Cause you, I think that like a lot of people approximately our age and younger, maybe grew up with this idea that like, boy, like just recently, like as recently as 1997, people knew how to date and there was some kind of protocol. And then that all disintegrated because of nine 11, I guess.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Nine 11 or online dating or like, oh, in the nineties, when you would hear like a sitcom joke about online dating, they're like, oh, what a loser.

• 30:44Sarah Marshall?

  Right. It was like for freaks. And now it's like, nobody has any clue how to meet if it's not online.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:50Sarah Marshall?

  Basically. And it's considered sort of like this interesting kind of extremism. Uh, if you don't do online dating, although people all hate it and I think are moving away from it now.

• 30:59Speaker 02

  I mean, I met my wife on Tinder, so worked out okay for me.

• 31:03Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah. Everybody met on Tinder. Yeah. I mean, we had, we had a period before Tinder became absolutely unusable. Where basically everybody you heard of and a happy couple met on Tinder.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:13Sarah Marshall?

  Now we have to find a new way because Tinder is terrible now.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  I mean, I've heard, I've heard Bumble's bad. I've, I've heard so many of them are just also unusable and bad.

• 31:21Sarah Marshall?

  I think we should all just start cruising each other at laundromats like people did in the seventies, as far as I can tell.

• 31:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:27Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know. I'm, as I imagine, maybe you are kind of of mixed feelings about this where it's like, it's really nice to not have everybody forced to go about mating in only one way. But also you can see how there are areas in life where people really crave having an etiquette. Because if there isn't kind of a rulebook to follow, then people just sort of seem to have no idea how to proceed.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I mean, things have definitely broken down over, say, like the last 10 years where, and there's always some new term for it, like Goblin Mode used to be one of it.

• 32:02Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I haven't heard that one in a, in a while. We go through slang so quickly now.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  People have gone feral.

• 32:07Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  I don't know. I, I, I think there is something to having like a general concept of etiquette. I mean, people are destroying movie theaters and doing 10s of thousands of damages to them because of the Minecraft movie right now. So like, maybe a general sense of chilling out would be cool.

• 32:24Sarah Marshall?

  Or I feel like, at least I certainly have a very clear idea in my head. The second you bring up the idea of educational films, especially of the 50s of like, this kind of Pleasantville idea of like manufacturing the American teenager as someone who's like, very civic minded and pleasure denying and apparently has no libido. And this really camp sense that we've derived from that. In the decade sense of like that feeling a little bit uncanny because it's trying to tell the the American teenager, maybe that there's something that they're not, you know?

• 32:59Speaker 02

  Oh, for sure. I mean, first of all, Pleasantville, what a movie. Love that movie so much. It's just beautifully shot and I love that it's doing exactly what it's doing, which is exactly about what you're saying.

• 33:08Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  So the reason, the reason that Pleasantville is fun and the reason that these films exist the way they do is because America has always been a very specific way, which is lying about our past.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  The reason these films got made in the first place, in which the kids are polite and always have their best Sunday best on and live happily in the suburbs and everyone is white and everything is the way it is, is because that actually wasn't the case.

• 33:36Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  Because why would you need to teach kids how to be pleasant, you know, normal, well behaved kids if they were already being well behaved? So the idea is, so the fact that they exist at all disproves that the 50s were like Leave It To Beaver. I'm sure that they were to some degree, but if they were, at the very least, adults were fearful that they weren't.

• 34:02Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And like, what is the Leave It To Beaver past that people were insisting on, you know, creating the illusion of at the time?

• 34:11Speaker 02

  I mean, it's the, it's the nuclear family. It's that the, you know, the local sheriff is a good guy and that everyone's neighborly and everyone knows each other and there's no such things as drugs and nobody dies and no one gets pregnant before marriage and everything is great and can be wrapped up comfortably at the end of a 20 minute episode.

• 34:31Sarah Marshall?

  Right, right. It's, it's interesting how much our dream of who we were coincides with the invention of the sitcom. We're like, It is, there is a sort of sense of amnesia of like, no trouble lasts. Everything is reset for next time. You know, we sort of live in this eternal present where also, and like, this is more getting into sort of styles of narrative, maybe than periods in history, but like, that coinciding is interesting, right? Where like, it does feel like everyone who is alive today is exposed to a lot of horrifying and potentially traumatic information, right? And we all pretty much see everything, or what feels like everything,

• 35:13Sarah Marshall?

  whether we want to or not. So I feel like it's interesting to talk about World War II is a period for Americans where like, you saw less because of just what technology allowed you to see and also how much, you know, sort of newsreel footage and sort of media reporting on the war was actually just, you know, to my knowledge, faked in Hollywood to sort of, you know, or that there was like plenty of actual footage, but that it wasn't until the Vietnam War that Americans really started getting like unmitigated access.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  Seeing it directly, yeah. It changed a lot of things, yeah.

• 35:50Sarah Marshall?

  So there was less of that illusion of immediacy, but there was more of the reality of so many people having family members who died or who came back physically disabled or mentally or emotionally traumatized. This longing for kind of an extremely peaceful world and even sort of inventing the sitcom as a form of media where everything kind of takes place in an eternal present where nothing matters is like, I'm probably reading too much into it. I guess love sitcoms, but it feels a little telling, you know?

• 36:22Speaker 02

  No, for sure. And like, this is the America that like, people think we can make great again. Like, this is what people want to return to.

• 36:30Sarah Marshall?

  Right. This is the illusion we're trying to make flesh, despite the fact that it never was flesh to begin with. Yeah. Right. And as you're saying, it's like, anything that a country needs to insist upon through culture clearly is something that isn't happening, or else we wouldn't insist upon it.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  Precisely. So like, we're trying to return to Reagan's America. Which in turn, which specifically was trying to be like 1950s America. And a lot of the media of the time like is also influenced by the Hayes Code. Which means that like, you know, villains are wholly bad and good guys are wholly good. And everything is as simple and rudimentary as possible. And we really want simple America. Because we want to go back to a time where like, you're not allowed to put, you know, non-white people in your movies unless they're fucking villains. You're not allowed to portray queerness, even though most of the big, even though a ton of the people who were making big decisions in Hollywood, were in making movies were gay. Uh, like this was just the way it was.

• 37:28Speaker 02

  And this is trying to uphold, you know, a certain standard of suburban white America. Because, again, like looking at the microcosm of what a classroom film is, the filmmakers who made them were very progressive. If they weren't, then the films would be significantly more boring. There were debates amongst educators early on, on whether or not including music in an educational film is too much of an approximation of entertainment.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  The films themselves were almost too close to entertainment. And then if you add music, it's like, oh, these kids are gonna be having so much fun. They're not gonna be learning.

• 38:02Sarah Marshall?

  They're gonna be partying down to the hygiene film.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're not gonna learn anything. So there was restraints, but the filmmakers were ultimately trying to push something forward and trying to provide some information, either as trying to give kids some, like some sort of optimism and build their attitude in a way they think they should have it, or in a way that these adults used to have it and they want to pass that on to a younger generation. However, the companies that made them, the producers, they were selling a product. And they had standards on what they wanted to put out. So there were not a lot of interracial classroom films, because they did not sell. That is the fact, the cold, hard facts of the matter when it comes to something like this.

• 38:44Speaker 02

  Oftentimes, because, you know, classroom films take time to make and they take time to shop around because you have to physically do it. They would be the year before trying to predict what kind of stuff is going to be going on in the country in order to make movies that are accommodating to that, to then sell to the school board superintendent, teachers, what have you. And hundreds of these movies are getting made every single year, covering largely a lot of the same topics, but you know, a still a wide range across, you know, a few hundred every year. And with that, you get a pattern. With that, you get something that you think, you know, a white suburban

• 39:25Speaker 02

  superintendent is going to buy because he recognizes it as like, this is exactly what I want my students to behave by. I want them to be, you know, I want them to be courteous and pleasant and delightful, and I want them to get along like this. So ultimately, it's all about a product, like.

• 39:41Sarah Marshall?

  He'll buy, he'll buy two copies of Don't Tape Notes to the Superintendent's Ass.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, honestly, yes. Tons of stuff like that happens where it's like, oh, now, Jimmy, you wouldn't do that. Think about how they might feel.

• 39:58Sarah Marshall?

  That's very good. Do you have like a selection of titles? Because there's nothing I would love to hear more than an example of what some of these are called.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  I have a book in front of me. It's a phenomenal little read from the late 90s called Mental Hygiene Classroom Films, 1945 to 1970. It's by Ken Smith. Apparently, my copy is signed. I didn't know that when I accidentally spilled wine on it a couple of weeks ago.

• 40:19Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, no, Ken.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  Sorry about your book, Ken. It's a fantastic read and a wonderful resource for this sort of thing. God, let's look at some of the titles just by title here and see if you can glean something. I'm flipping to random pages. Let's just see what we got.

• 40:31Sarah Marshall?

  What I love, The Lucky Dip.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  Let's see here. Make Your Home Safe.

• 40:35Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  Lunchroom Manners.

• 40:36Sarah Marshall?

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  Mother Max Puppies and Find Happy Homes.

• 40:40Sarah Marshall?

  Mmm.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  Parents Are People Too.

• 40:43Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah, I've heard that.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  Patterns of Smartness. The Political Process. Snap Out of It. Sniffles and Sneezes.

• 40:50Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  Skipper Learns a Lesson.

• 40:52Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, no.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Student Government at Work. Subject Narcotics.

• 40:59Sarah Marshall?

  That's a fun one.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  Toward emotional maturity. Too young to burn.

• 41:04Sarah Marshall?

  What? What's that one?

• 41:06Speaker 02

  Uh, it appears to be animated. In this film, some scary Sid Davis narrator from Live and Learn explains that fire is very important to our civilization and that animals have never learned to regard fire as a friend. Unfortunately, and unlike Live and Learn, all the scenes in which terrible accidents happen to children are shown using Magic Marker cartoon illustrations, not live actors.

• 41:27Sarah Marshall?

  That's probably good. Yeah.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  This is one live action scene in which a fire lets his infant son burn his hand on a toaster while mom looks to teach him about fire and pain.

• 41:35Sarah Marshall?

  Ooh.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  So yeah, uh, what, what about alcoholism? What about prejudice?

• 41:42Sarah Marshall?

  What about Bob?

• 41:43Speaker 02

  There are some movies in here that like, I've seen a couple that are just teaching like students not to be racist and those obviously came quite a bit later than like the 40s and 50s. But like, the titles can cover anything and they have sensational little, they, they have really attention grabbing titles and they cover a wide range of feelings that just are meant to come at you hard and fast because very few of them clear the 20 minute mark.

• 42:07Sarah Marshall?

  Do we have any sense of like, these being successful or was it more that they sort of created an economy?

• 42:13Speaker 02

  See, that's hard to say. They certainly were sold. Whether or not they were shown to classes varied because, um, a lot of the teachers didn't really know how to work projectors. So then you had the AV department and if every stereotype you've ever seen about the AV department is true, they're very protective of their projectors and no one's allowed to touch it other than me. So, uh, a lot of, a lot of these movies were made. Um, some of them were bought, some percentage of them. It's hard to say because figures are a little dicey at this time and how often they were shown is also complicated because thousands of these films have been lost because storage was expensive. Some of them did get played because the school

• 42:58Speaker 02

  bought it and decided, well, this is our one film about menstruation that we've got and we're going to show it to kids for 15 years until it falls apart. And then they disposed of it that way. I would say the earliest ones, there's only- A couple hundred around that are preserved, some of which are like, there's a lot more copies of than others. But to some degree, like, they were successful. As I understand it, these films tended to be the most successful if they were contemporary, which encouraged schools to keep buying them. Because if it was like a kid in like 1965, and the film is from 1955, and they're using a whole lot of keen and swell language, and they're like, gee dad, then the kids can't relate to it. And it fails to do its job because they don't recognize themselves. They recognize their parents.

• 43:43Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, it does seem like kind of a fine line that you have to walk and that we have this sort of period of tension in sort of, you know, the long 50s where we're creating this culture of what we want the American teenager to be and trying to sort of convince them that like, this is what all the other ones are doing. And then it feels like part of the aggression that adults felt about Beatlemania, right, was like, that the language of it suggests that like, oh, my God, these teenage girls, they can't be stopped. They're they're like Niagara Falls. They're gonna kill us all.

• 44:18Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. They're too horny.

• 44:19Sarah Marshall?

  It feels like that that Beatlemania in retrospect represented a moment for American parents of like, never mind, we can't train them to be any different than they are.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  I mean, they certainly tried to some degree, but ultimately, I think like, there's a whole lot of like, children are supposed to be seen, not heard about it.

• 44:38Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and girls just want to chase boys around while screaming the whole time.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  Like, for real, though, I've I've seen A Hard Day's Night. That's just kind of all it is.

• 44:46Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 44:46Speaker 02

  Girls in particular, like, they are taught to be demure and soft spoken and ladylike. And we still, as a culture, have not figured out how to like, process that girls have big screaming feelings, and they tend to get made fun of for it. And that is just classic misogyny, of course.

• 45:05Sarah Marshall?

  It makes me think of even like, you know, the Shangri-Las.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  Love the Shangri-Las.

• 45:10Sarah Marshall?

  Like, the girl group music of the early 60s. Yeah, you know, and the Shangri-Las did Leader of the Pack. And I don't know, I think that like, various female rock stars have talked about being influenced by the Shangri-Las and sort of people have argued that they're sort of like proto punk because it's Yeah, girls have never gotten credit for, for rocking.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  I mean, those teen tragedies that they all run, like, like, a lot of the Shangri-La songs were about tragedies, like, "Leader of the Pack's about a motorcycle gang, like, 'I remember walking in the sand,' which has been sampled in more contemporary things, it's just like the Oh No song." Like, those are these big things about big experiences, and there's like, these little dramatic mini operas.

• 45:51Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, they are mini operas.

• 45:53Speaker 02

  Right, and like Jim Steiman, who loved the Shangri-La's, I believe he described them as like, being the best girl group gang because they wore leather jackets and they'd kick your ass.

• 46:05Sarah Marshall?

  And maybe you'd like them to kick your ass.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  They're so cool, I mean, how would you not?

• 46:09Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and this idea of sort of the teenage girl as being someone whose behavior you can just sort of ignore or see as outlier behavior or not representative of the gender until you're overtaken by a crowd of Beatles fans, I guess.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 46:24Sarah Marshall?

  Doesn't Beatlemania, to use an old Twitter joke template, imply the existence of Beatle depression?

• 46:33Sarah Marshall?

  Take us.

• 46:33Speaker 02

  So we've talked about how kids are allowed to have feelings, and they're allowed to have these thoughts because the classroom films say like, "You're allowed to have anxiety about not fitting in, you're allowed to have anxiety about this, and we're gonna teach you how to try to fix it."

• 46:47Sarah Marshall?

  Right, you're allowed to have feelings, but only to the extent that you are now going to manage them, have fun with that.

• 46:52Speaker 02

  Honestly, yes, because like, they started to have this, this emphasis, which was like, other-directed thinking, which was the idea of teaching kids to not think about themselves, which is fundamentally a good thing.

• 47:06Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, good.

• 47:07Speaker 02

  However, there is a dark side to that.

• 47:09Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, in moderation, yeah.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  So the good side of it is teens were suddenly becoming aware of their feelings and having them put in place where it's like, "Oh, you might be nervous about going to the dance, because, you know, maybe you don't know how to talk to people, and maybe your personality is a little off-putting, why is your personality off-putting? Maybe you don't know how to brush your hair, and you're not as popular, and you're not as well-liked as people, why is that?" And by acknowledging.

• 47:37Sarah Marshall?

  Are you ugly? Be honest.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. By giving these things of like either your appearance or your personality, by focusing on them, it then developed a hyper fixation. So now kids are taught that they're supposed to be insecure because they're not the popular kid in school in a like direct way that it had not been direct before.

• 47:54Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, this is actually a side topic, but I feel like I have throughout my life heard so many people say and identify with the statement as well of like learning disordered eating behaviors like from anti eating disorder, like cautionary media throughout your life. Yeah. And like, I don't know, I'm sure we've learned since the late 90s how to more responsibly or more effectively communicate the message we're trying to. But yeah, I feel like the the messages that adults give to adolescents, I feel like they always kind of receive a lot more information than the people who make them necessarily realize is going to be picked up.

• 48:34Speaker 02

  I think that there is this sort of hands off parenting that we have just really, that is a big part of American culture. To the point that like even these educational films, the idea was that they were made to be discussed. Like you're gonna have it and you're gonna present, you know, a 15 minute little story about what have you, you know, you know, how to ask your mom politely to use the car, you know, you're gonna have a little story about that. And, you know, what's a better way to phrase that? Maybe don't come in all guns ablaze in, offer to help your mom out, maybe, you know, manipulate her a little bit, win friends and influence people, you know, not, not judging on that. It just is what it is. But you're supposed to then have the teacher discuss it with you afterwards. That was sort

• 49:16Speaker 02

  of the intention, but there's no universal way to enforce that. How it's going to be processed is going to be totally different. Some teachers also didn't even like these movies. If they were older, then they were very old school and didn't like the use of films kind of in general. They saw movies as a way of breaking up tedium while they had some other shit to do.

• 49:32Sarah Marshall?

  As so many of us did. Yeah.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  That was, that was the whole thing. But the fact of the matter is like, we present stuff to kids and teens and then don't unpack it with them. And I mean, rightfully so, like a whole lot of kids, you'd see this in the 60s where it's like, don't trust anybody over 30. Like they're really resistant to adults telling them what to do. And sometimes they'll get frustrated because like they then feel dumb because they don't understand it. And they'll maybe lash out that way. There's a million directions it could go. But the fact of the matter is, Presenting someone Breaking Bad, which can then teach them accurately how to make crystal meth, maybe having someone break it down and be like, all right, cool. So that's there, but you don't need to make meth.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  You shouldn't make meth, you know, it's just simply putting something in a movie shouldn't be the be all, end all of what it is. Actually analyzing and discussing it should be equally as important.

• 50:28Sarah Marshall?

  Well, that's what went wrong with Oliver Stone and Wall Street.

• 50:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, like we don't want to talk to kids. Like, that's the thing is like, we want to put the movie in front of them and we want the movie to raise them the same way that we want the iPad to raise them. It's just easier. And like, I get it, adults are, adults are tired, but like, that's only half of it.

• 50:44Sarah Marshall?

  Or you just need, you know, your, your iPad to occupy your toddler because you'll get arrested if they go outside or something like that.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  No, totally.

• 50:52Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, we're in this period still, but at the time even more so, I think in many ways, we were figuring out how media could educate and what its limitations were, you know? Because this was also the beginning of, you know, film entering the classroom, as you've been talking about, which is sort of hard to imagine a time before in a way. It's like one of the most basic technologies that basically all of us remember.

• 51:19Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, totally. Like, I, I think these movies never went away. And the way that they've changed has just gotten kind of updated with the times. Like, you think about how, you know, in the seventies and especially when you get to the eighties, you get the after school special. You start to see a lot of this type of education, you know, the more dogmatic stuff become, you know, mail order VHSs that they play in Sunday school. I watched a bunch of stuff like this. Like, that was a normal thing.

• 51:49Sarah Marshall?

  We get into anti satanic panic education at this point.

• 51:52Speaker 02

  Like, they evolved to the point where now you have people who, you know, probably in 50 years, you could look back on the video and go like, oh, that's cringe or that's embarrassing or you didn't know what you were talking about. But like, you can look at a TikTok video and it's still someone trying to teach you a lesson through entertainment and information as best as they can, that is available to them at the time. Like, things have never

• 52:17Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 52:18Speaker 02

  Gone away.

• 52:19Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 52:24Sarah Marshall?

  Sorry, I'm a little bit horrified at the way I've been spending my free time. And that's if you're lucky, because it's often just ads.

• 52:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course.

• 52:32Sarah Marshall?

  It's like masquerading as education, but instead it's just ads.

• 52:36Speaker 02

  Oh, and they did those movies too. Don't get me wrong. They were like educational films about fragrance. And it's just Evian trying to figure, help you figure out what scent you are. So you buy from them. Like, that's a normal thing too.

• 52:46Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 52:46Speaker 02

  But again, they've never gone away.

• 52:48Sarah Marshall?

  As soon as there is a form of media will reliably be used as, you know, to try and manipulate kids. Or that will be, I think, one of the things that drives its development often. But yeah, and it's interesting because I feel like you're getting into one of the unspoken differences in the attitudes of different Americans, which is what is the purpose of education? And what is the purpose of school? Because I think a lot of people believe, and you know, in the most benign way you could put it, is that you go and kind of, as you were saying about rote learning and recitation, that like you learn on this date, this happened and this is seven times eight. And this is, you know, what

• 53:29Sarah Marshall?

  salt is on the periodic table. And you sort of acquire knowledge that you're able to then remember enough of to have a trade, you know, and also you've been trained to move around as the bells go off and whatever else. Versus the idea that education exists to teach people to critically think and therefore have better lives and be better citizens. Not by being followers, but by being able to think critically about what's going on around them and to actually question situations potentially. And I mean, I think that's clearly a conversation that we have not settled in the United States.

• 54:04Speaker 02

  Oh, it's such like a hot thing right now, obviously, when everything is just constantly changing from day to day. And God knows what it'll look like by the time this episode actually comes out.

• 54:14Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, maybe everything will have calmed down by then.

• 54:20Speaker 02

  One can hope.

• 54:23Speaker 02

  So I, so I had a, I had a math teacher. He was the wrestling coach with nasty color flowered ears. And he was also the football coach and my school had a very strict rule of like, if you're going to teach, you know, a sport, if you're going to coach a sport, you also have to be a teacher because we're getting our money's worth out of you. And most of the like football coaches taught history because all that was, was reading out of a book. You go, the war of 1812 happened in 1812.

• 54:46Sarah Marshall?

  Like, sorry about the brain damage. Read this chapter again. The answers are in the back of your edition.

• 54:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And then we just watched some movie that they like or nine hours of Band of Brothers. This teacher, though, with the cauliflower ear, he was the math teacher and he shouldn't have been the math teacher. He was not particularly good at math. And so sometimes they would present me with a formula and I would go, okay, cool. What am I learning? Like, how will I use this? I would like to know the practical purpose of what is this thing you are teaching me? And then he would look down at the book and go, well, using this formula, it'll teach you if you're standing 30 feet away from a flagpole, you can use angles to figure out how tall the flagpole is. And I go, that's not, when am I going to use that? That isn't helpful to me. Actually teach me like, when is the practical purposes or what I'm doing other? And then he would go, just memorize the formula.

• 55:34Sarah Marshall?

  Teach me when I'm gonna wanna measure a flagpole and why?

• 55:38Speaker 02

  And then he would just say, memorize the formula. You just need to know it for the test. And I go, that's not helpful.

• 55:44Sarah Marshall?

  But at least that's the real answer, I guess. You need to know this so that our school doesn't lose funding. Because if you don't agree to memorize something that you could actually save space in your brain by keeping out of and put in more Pumpkins lyrics, then we will have no money. Learn the formula.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:02Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I do believe that kids have always had a right to have a real reason and a good reason for why they're learning the things that they're learning and spending their time the way that they are.

• 56:12Speaker 02

  What these films were trying to stress was that most of a kid's coming of age is spent in a classroom, right? That is where you will probably spend most of your waking hours when you're in school. Because the math breaks down as like roughly eight hours of sleep, eight hours at school, eight hours divvy between dinner with the family and cutting the grass and walking the Johnson's dog and doing homework and everything else that you do during your last eight waking hours. So like, the influence that school has on you and being pretty much exclusively surrounded by your peers on a 30 to one ratio of adults, like, that was an important topic to be having because

• 56:52Speaker 02

  so much of you being taught about the world and who you are and what you're experiencing by merely existing. Couldn't be taught solely by parents. And then clearly, a lot of the parents didn't want to because they just said, oh, it's the school's job to teach you things.

• 57:06Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Yeah. And the question of whose job it is, uh, it's whoever you can get at this point. Yeah.

• 57:14Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. So, so there's a lovely dissertation that I really liked when researching this whole topic for this episode. It's called Hot Rods, Shy Guys and Sex Kittens: Social Guidance Films in the American High School, 1947 to 1957 by Michelle Anne Buhl. It's online. You gotta pay for the full one, but it is online and it is a phenomenal read on this subject. One of the things I found in there that I quite liked, that feels very reflective of where we are right now, is that in 1957, we were in the heat of the space race with the Russians, and we lost.

• 57:48Sarah Marshall?

  We sure did.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  Sputnik went to space. America did not get to space first. That's why we had to land on the moon first. But after that happened, the idea of like a mental hygiene film kind of dies flat. Like, they'll still make them, but by and large, they don't make those anymore because it is a seen as a back to basics approach for education. We don't care about your feelings. We don't care about teaching you about silly things like dating. Those aren't important. We're going to refocus on math and science and back to basics like recitation for education because we can't keep losing to the Russians. And looking at that in our like current landscape where it's like, yeah, I mean, ideally, we want

• 58:34Speaker 02

  to strip away as much information as humanly possible. We want it to be basic. We want to just repeat things in class. We want to have our education not really be focused on like, you know, the social aspect of life. It should be the bare bones things that exist in the textbook, which are heavily curated and nothing more.

• 58:56Sarah Marshall?

  So what comes of that in this kind of evolving form?

• 59:00Speaker 02

  So for classroom films, that is, once we remove, you know, dating and mental hygiene from the equation, that's where we start to refocus purely on scared straight stories. If we're getting these ones, that's when they get violent again. That is when we're talking about like Jenny did heroin and she died at a party. That is where someone, their car careens off of a cliff. Like, these were stories that had existed before that, but this is where they start to really pick up, leading into the 1960s. And this coincides with like, the death of rock and roll and every other disturbing thing that is happening at the time.

• 59:34Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm. I have a favorite, which is like a 1980s example.

• 59:38Speaker 02

  Oh, hit me.

• 59:39Sarah Marshall?

  Called Good Kids Die Too. Yeah.

• 59:43Speaker 02

  What's it about?

• 59:44Sarah Marshall?

  It's just, it's about, it's about some good kids who go to a party and they do some drugs for the first time ever with their friends who do drugs habitually, but they die because good kids die too. And there you go. It's a very simple plot, but it's effective.

• 59:59Speaker 02

  I mean, I remember being in DARE and they'd be like, hey, do you like Nirvana? Do you like Kurt Cobain? Yeah. Heroin? You can OD on heroin the very first time you do heroin, unlike other drugs where you'll die eventually.

• 1:00:12Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God. Okay, so basically, we have moved from a controlling and, you know, not entirely altruistic idea, but a fairly ambitious one about using this new technology that we suddenly have in abundance after the end of World War II, that we're going to introduce to American schools and teach the American teenager to be model citizens and proactively get into like, basic life skills, you know, that people often complain about not having any way of being taught today, regardless of if it's sort of an unrealistic and repressive way. And then within a very short period, we ran out of patience and decided to just scare the American teenager as much as possible.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, that's what sells. Fear sells.

• 1:01:01Sarah Marshall?

  Well, it is true. I mean, I do buy a lot of it. So, yeah.

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  I mean, the, the act of creating something is creating a product. So like, even if you have like good intentions and you have good means and you want to have a good message, like you're still selling a product. Otherwise, if they don't buy it, then no one sees it.

• 1:01:16Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, this is the thing. So that is the American teenager. We noticed that they existed. And then very quickly, we decided to just manipulate them through fear alone.

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  I mean, kinda. I mean, it just became too unignorable. Once you get to the 60s, like the idea of everything being perfect was not sustainable because they have eyes, you know? Like, once you get to the 1960s, like, there's the civil rights movement. There's Vietnam. There's a lot of kids now starting to like experiment with drugs on a larger scale. I, I, I tried to figure out like why the classroom film, film kind of falls out of favor, especially once you hit 1970. Like, there's ebbs and flows of like, 1957 is kind of like the death as we understand it. The 60s is when it warps into something altogether where it's these cautionary tales and you do start to get more of the teen directed media.

• 1:02:07Speaker 02

  And come 1970, pretty much like it's done. It's like, absolutely, that's it. And I tried to figure out like, okay, was it the after school special that killed it? Maybe that's what it was. And no, I don't think that's the case. Okay. Was it that you're now able to like view stuff at home because most houses have TVs? So the idea of seeing a TV in school, like the novelty of, you know, moving pictures outside of a movie theater, isn't quite as effective as it was back in the day. No, that's not it. Okay. What is it? And the fact of the matter is, it stopped working. That's it. They weren't effective anymore.

• 1:02:44Sarah Marshall?

  They stopped being compelling?

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  They needed to address problems that like, school officials didn't want to discuss because it's like, oh, now we're starting to cross a line because we can't show stuff about the Vietnam War. The parents might get mad. So we can't throw things about what's going on in a contemporary world like this because there's too many issues. So now it just seems like it is stuck in this kind of Pleasantville bubble where it is totally contained because the world as it is, doesn't fit in a neat little package anymore, like classroom films wanted to be.

• 1:03:14Sarah Marshall?

  That's interesting.

• 1:03:15Speaker 02

  It was unavoidable. It was never gonna be sustainable. And like, I mean, even when you get to the 80s, like, there's new fears there. That's when you got the satanic panic, obviously.

• 1:03:24Sarah Marshall?

  The fake teens were swamped. Yeah. Increased access to media can bring you closer to reality in a way that means that propaganda doesn't work on you as unilaterally as it used to. There's actually something very redemptive in that.

• 1:03:41Speaker 02

  Uh huh. I don't know. I think there's just something about the idea of being entertained and how you want to see something and you want to learn something at this point. Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's just you. Maybe we just crave knowledge and like information isn't, facts aren't information and information isn't knowledge and knowledge isn't wisdom. And I'm always trying to figure out what I've learned from things and how to try to be a wiser person. So at the end of the day, we're all just idiots trying our best. And we just, we want to be entertained and we also want to learn things. Our entertainment should also have some gleam of insight and wisdom nestled in there somewhere.

• 1:04:18Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Anything else? I feel like that, yeah, that's beautiful. It's a beautiful tale.

• 1:04:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know. I, I guess if anybody wants to watch a ludicrous amount of these films and have fun with them, or don't, a lot of them are actually just exceedingly dull. The AV Geek website has like thousands and thousands of them archived. So like, go, go check them out.

• 1:04:42Sarah Marshall?

  Well, and where can people get more Harmony Colangelo in their lives?

• 1:04:47Speaker 02

  If you want to hear me talk about all kinds of teen media, not usually this old, uh, cause we tend to stop at the seventies in most cases. Uh, you could find my podcast, The Sense of Prom, which I do with my lovely wife, over where you get your podcasts and follow us on social medias. Um, and I'm personally over on Instagram at Velocitraptor or on Blue Sky at Harmony Colangelo, because apparently I'm not allowed to have underscores over there. So I had to use my real name.

• 1:05:12Sarah Marshall?

  Well, thank you for coming on to talk about teens and just try to make sense of the world through kitsch. It's my favorite way to do it and I love doing it with you.

• 1:05:23Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you for having me and allowing me to have disorganized thoughts about the way these films are not evil and teens are so aren't evil. Drag racing hellions who do drugs and get pregnant at 14 most of the time. That's not usually the case. They, they don't all do that. That's not all they do with their leisure.

• 1:05:42Sarah Marshall?

  And even if you are drag racing and getting pregnant the whole time, you still have a rich inner life, you know?

• 1:05:48Speaker 02

  Honestly, like, sounds cool as hell.

• 1:05:50Sarah Marshall?

  Exactly.

• 1:05:52Sarah Marshall?

  Thank you for being with us and drag racing through time.

• 1:05:56Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:06:03Speaker 03

  Back on his front porch, Skipper felt very sorry for himself. He whimpered and complained in the saddest voice he could manage. Skipper did a lot of thinking. "I have been a silly dog," he said to himself. Imagine not liking others because of their looks. While the children dried him, he thought some more. Size, shape, or color make no difference after all. Being nice is the only thing that counts. And being nice is something inside. Nothing else really matters. I'm sorry about the way I behaved. I'd like to play with you now if you'll let me. After that, everyone played together and had a good time.

• 1:06:52Sarah Marshall?

  And that is our episode. Thank you so much for being here with us. Thank you to our amazing guest, Harmony Colangelo, co-host of This Ends at Prom. Please listen if you enjoy movies and teenage girls and the things that they get up to in movies. I almost said "we." I still identify with a teenage girl in any movie. Thank you to Corinne Ruff for editing. Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing. Smell you later, gators.