Inventing the Teenager with Harmony Colangelo
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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. 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 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 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. 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. 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. Oh, yeah. 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. 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 he...

You talk about sort of the American love of folly. Maybe just like this idea of novelty. Novelty. Like this very innocent way of novelty and a childlike wonder and how that goes wrong. Yeah. Well, and I suspect that you're bringing back some of our ability to feel wonder about these stories.

I try. Yeah.

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 Two. And that opens up a whole bunch of follow up questions. But I, 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 treated

Right.

You know, as a more broad, weirdly impersonal term. Why must I be a teen hyphen ager in love famously? Yes, exactly. So the reason that that exists in World War Two 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 at the back of her seams to 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. Like Molly, the American girl. Yes. I take your word for that. I wouldn't know. Is that Molly's whole thing? 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 going to 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? Because like everyone else got to do something different.

relevant moment in time. Teens can do anything. I believe in it. Teens can do anything, including being boring. That's true. That's true. You make a good point. Right. 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 at the

Time, not a very good time for the United States economically. These kids have never known peace. They've never known anything. All they've done is stockpiled rubber. Yeah, basically. 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, from Europe with a bunch of stories he'll never tell to anyone until...

The day he dies. I'd like to think he swapped stories with his war buddies. Yeah. Right? I've seen King of the Hill. I know what Cotton Hill's whole deal is. Talk about killing 50 men. Yeah, it is. I know that there's a lot of nuance to it and a lot of complexity, but it is a moment I guess I broadly think about.

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. 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 adults

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 not, there's Hollywood, but the idea of like,

Teen culture is generally viewed as vapid and based on excess to some degree. We're going to eat too much sugar. We're going to drive too fast. We're going to have too much fun making out. Like that is what teen culture largely is built on. And when you're in a war and an economic decline, it's,

You don't have that luxury. Music doesn't... There's 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... It's just big band music, which everyone is supposed to freak out to equally. Yeah. So exactly that. So what did teen culture look like at the time? I don't know. What's that one? Bugsy Malone, where it's Jodie Foster in a gangster movie, but they're children? Kind of looks like that. I choose to believe that's the case. Yeah.

Maybe an example of teen culture is the Andy Hardy movies, which were coming out through the late 30s and early 40s, which are Mickey Rooney is a prototypical teen who's like, I don't know, forever overlooked kind of love interest monkees played by Judy Garland and.

And they're not scary teenagers. They're cute little teenagers. You know, it's like a very new kind of picture of adolescence. And we're certainly not meant to feel threatened by these characters. 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. Even if there's witches. In fact, especially if there are. 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 time.

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

classroom film. So there's a lot of... This is the core backbone of what I want to talk about for teen culture because it really 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. Mental hygiene is a phrase that I've always found both delightful and creepy. 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. Yeah.

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, they 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. Rapid mass learning. I like that. It sounds like a monorail. There is something also alarming about it, much like the term mental hygiene itself, where I'm like, I don't like it. 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. 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 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 how you view your project, you know? It's very clinical. And clinical like the way you talk about a lab rat, kind of? Yeah. Like if it's not clinical, then it 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.

Yeah, I can see that certainly in this period. But also the idea of this being the period as well when...

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... We gotta be better than the Nazis. The Nazis made eugenics look really bad, so we're just gonna do it quietly now for a while. But you can see how those ideas get...

slightly more covertly expressed and all kinds of racist ideology and alleged science and you know the next you know until now as we can see 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? 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.

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. 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. Yeah.

Yeah. It's cheesy, but it was effective because now you at least have the fear of the consequences in mind, right? Yeah, it worked. It worked at the job it set out for itself. Yeah. We were commiserating at work the other day about this kind of thing. And I was talking about how before my senior prom, we got letters from kindergartners or first graders that was basically saying, 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. 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 want me. Although I have just started to live. I haven't even won yet.

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. Um,

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. 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

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. 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, OK, I get it. My God, like I understand that.

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 going to haunt me. Oh, 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 go against the grain, if you become a beatnik or

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, um,

These films are very important in the discussion of teen Canada and America because it is actually the first time that teens emotions were ever really acknowledged on a wide scale. Certainly academically. How depressing. And yet I'm like, yep, that feels right.

Tell me more about that. 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. I think this is how George Orwell talked about history being taught. Also, you know, different example, but in English public schools. Yeah. 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 Two and it was just like Nazis are bad. And it's like, OK, 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. Clearly not.

Really not. Or at least, you know, we didn't make enough cautionary films about it or whatever works. No, we had to go rah, rah, rah. D-Day. We saved the day. Go America. Americans are good. Right. That's the lesson. Yeah. Not that, you know.

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

By using classroom films and actually having, you know, 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, rich

different places in time and fantasy, like that was an 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 because they

During this era, juvenile delinquency was seen as one of the biggest epidemics in America that we couldn't quite solve. And what is juvenile delinquency while we're on the subject? I mean, I think the idea is them just like not going to school 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. I've heard that. Yeah. Although in Buffy, you know, they do challenge that premise a little. Yeah.

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? That is absolutely a factor. Thank you for asking. So in the wake of World War Two.

The economy is booming. The best thing to ever happen to America was World War II. Nothing like taking out all the other economic superpowers at once, you know? Right? It's just last man standing. Worked out really well for us from a financial standpoint. Let's not think about the other standpoints too much. Precisely. So these teens who have never known or even heard tales of a time where they could not be in horrible financial ruin. Yeah.

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. Somewhere that's green, if you will. Oh, yes. Right, right. 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 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

no concept of mortality are now going as fast as humanly possible and car accidents 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 going to teach you how to think about your about others and fit in and be a good kid or we're going to 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 the ghost of drag strip hollow 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. And even on the music side, you know, Jan and Dean's dead man's curve and all the great car crash pop songs. Yeah.

I mean, 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... Yeah. I mean, there was also just the...

Yeah.

I think they got married. 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. 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. 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 the idea of

Teenagers, even at this time, being aware of the allure of this figure being partly the idea of 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 you said, it's affluence that has been brought about by the end of World War II and by this 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. 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. We're not having a Great Depression anymore. There's a chicken in the pot. Yeah, like, it's arguably the best America's ever been. Like,

You're upset for it. Right. 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 loan 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 enjoy.

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 in.

Yeah, it was a third space. Right. And also that, you know, any 50s nostalgia also is like so big on diners and soda shops because we understand...

There needs to be a nexus for life to happen, for plots to happen. Yeah. I mean, the equivalent that you would have is like essentially it's a teenage version of a bar. 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 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. 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 in 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 way of dating as kids,

Yeah.

But like compared to the parents, like one of my favorite teen films of this era 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 friends kid. Okay. I'm glad the word kid was at the end of that sentence. It was stressful for a second. Yeah.

It was not dad's friend. No, it was his kid. I mean, you never know because there's also the bachelor and the Bobby socks that were only a few years away from the unpleasantness. It was the 50s. 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. I decide who you mate with Gidget.

Yeah, exactly. And I think that that is just a fascinating evolution to look at that for why you almost do need educational films to teach the idea of what dating is now because it isn't what it used to be. Well, yeah. And I mean, it's interesting how, and this is a whole other topic really, but how recent is the concept of dating and how long did it last for? Because I think that a lot of people...

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

9-11, I guess. Yeah. 9-11 or online dating like, oh, in the 90s when you would hear like a sitcom joke about online dating, they're like, oh, what a loser. Right. It was like for freaks. And now it's like nobody has any clue how to meet if it's not online online.

Yeah, basically. And it's considered sort of like this interesting kind of extremism. If you don't do online dating, although people all hate it, and I think are moving away from it now. I mean, I met my wife on Tinder. So worked out okay for me. Oh, yeah. Everybody met on Tinder. Yeah. I mean, we had a period before Tinder became absolutely unusable. We're basically everybody you heard of in a happy couple met on Tinder.

But now we have to find a new way because Tinder is terrible now. I mean, I've heard Bumble's bad. I've heard so many of them are just also unusable and bad. I think we should all just start cruising each other at laundromats like people did in the 70s, as far as I can tell. Yeah. I don't know. 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 rule book to follow, then people just sort of seem to have no idea how to proceed. Oh, yeah. I mean, things have definitely broken down over, say, like the last 10 years. And there's always some new term for it, like goblin mode used to be one of it. Yeah, I haven't heard that one in a while. We go through slang so quickly now. People have gone feral. Yeah.

I don't know. I think there is something to having like a general concept of etiquette. I mean, people are destroying movie theaters and doing tens 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. 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 in 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 since of like that feeling a little bit uncanny because it's trying to tell the American teenager maybe that there's something that they're not. Yeah.

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. So 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.

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. OK, 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. Right. And like, what is the leave it to beaver pass that people were insisting on, you know, creating the illusion of at the time? I mean, it's the it's the nuclear family. It's that 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. Yeah.

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. Right. Right. It's interesting how much our dream of who we were coincides with the invention of the sitcom. We're like...

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 horrors

horrifying and potentially traumatic information, right? And we all pretty much see everything or what feels like everything, 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 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, 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. Seeing it directly. Yeah. It changed a lot of things. Yeah.

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 that I'm probably reading too much into it. I guess love sitcoms, but it feels a little telling, you know? No, for sure. And like,

This is the America that people think we can make great again. This is what people want to return to. 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. 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,

And a lot of the media of the time is also influenced by the Hays Code, which means that 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. Yeah.

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 making movies were gay. Like this was just the way it was. And this is trying to uphold, you know, a certain standard of suburban white America because, you know,

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. Yeah.

The films themselves were almost too close to entertainment. And then if you add music, it's like, oh, these kids are going to be having so much fun. They're not going to be learning. They're going to be partying down to the hygiene film. Yeah, they're not going to learn anything. So there was restraints, but the filmmakers were ultimately trying to push something forward and out.

trying to provide some information, either as trying to give kids 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 cold hard facts of the matter when it comes to something like this. Oftentimes because 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, um,

With that, you get a pattern. With that, you get something that you think, you know, a white suburban 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 that.

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

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 weeks ago. Oh, no, Ken. 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. That's what I love. The Lucky Dip. Let's see here.

Make your home safe. Lunchroom manners. Mother max puppies and find happy homes. Parents are people too. Oh yeah, I've heard that. Patterns of smartness. The political process. Snap out of it. Sniffles and sneezes. Skipper learns a lesson. Oh no. Student government at work. Subject narcotics.

That's a fun one. Toward emotional maturity. Too young to burn. What? What's that one? 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. That's probably good. Yeah.

Yeah. 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. Ooh. Ooh.

So yeah, what about alcoholism? What about prejudice? What about Bob? There are some movies in here that 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 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. Yeah.

Do we have any sense of these being successful, or was it more that they sort of created an economy? See, that's hard to say. They certainly were sold. Whether or not they were shown to classes varied because...

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. Yeah.

So a lot of these movies were made. 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 bought it and decided, well, this is our one film about menstruation that we've gotten. 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.

Uh, 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. Yeah.

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 and 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 is

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 like Niagara Falls. They're going to kill us all. They're too horny. It feels like 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. 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. Yeah. And girls just want to chase boys around while screaming the whole time. Like for real, though, I've I've seen a hard day's night. That's just kind of all it is. Yeah. Girls in particular, like they are taught to be demure and quiet.

soft-spoken and ladylike. And we still, as a culture, have not figured out how to 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. It makes me think of even like...

Love the Shangri-Las.

For rocking. I mean, those teen tragedies that they all run. 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 as just, like, the Oh No song. Like, those are these big things about big experiences. Like, these little dramatic mini-operas. Yeah, they are mini-operas. Right. And, like, Jim Steinman, who loved the Shangri-Las, I believe he described them as, like,

Being the best girl group gang because they wore leather jackets and they'd kick your ass. And maybe you'd like them to kick your ass. They're so cool. I mean, how would you not? 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 later.

you're overtaken by a crowd of Beatles fans, I guess. Absolutely. Doesn't Beatlemania, to use an old Twitter joke template, imply the existence of Beatle depression? Yeah.

Take us. 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 going to teach you how to try to fix it. Right. You're allowed to have feelings, but only to the extent that you are now going to manage them. Have fun with that. Honestly, yes, because like they started to have this this emphasis on.

Which was like other directed thinking, which was the idea of teaching kids to not think about themselves, which is fundamentally a good thing. Oh, good. However, there is a dark side to that. Yeah.

In moderation. Yeah. 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? Yeah.

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 you ugly, be honest. Exactly. By giving these things of like either your appearance or your personality by focusing on them, it then developed 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 direct way that it had not been direct before. Right.

Yeah, this is such 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. 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 going to have it and you're going to present, you know, a 15 minute little story about what have you, you know, you know, how, how to ask your mom politely to use the car. You know, you're going to have a little story about that. And, you know, what's a better way to phrase that? Maybe don't come in all guns a blazing 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, uh,

discuss it with you afterwards. That was sort 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. As so many of us did. Yeah. That was the whole thing. But the fact of the matter is we present stuff to kids and teens and then don't

unpack it with them. I mean, rightfully so like a whole lot of kids, you'd see this in the sixties 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. Cause like they then feel dumb. Cause they don't understand it. And they'll maybe lash out that way. There's a million directions that could go. But the fact of the matter is presenting someone breaking bad, which can then teach them accurately how to make crystal meth and

maybe having someone break it down and be like, all right, cool. So that's there, but you don't need to make meth.

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. Well, that's what went wrong with Oliver Stone and Wall Street. Yeah. Like we don't want to talk to kids like that's the thing. It's 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. Yeah.

And like, I get it. Adults are adults are tired, but like that's only half of it. You know, your your iPad to occupy your toddler because you'll get arrested if they go outside or something like that. Totally.

Oh, 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 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 70s and especially when you get to the 80s you get the after school special you start to see um a lot of this type of education you know the more dogmatic stuff become you

mail order VHSs that they play in Sunday school. I watched a bunch of stuff like this. That was a normal thing. We get into anti-Satanic panic education at this point. They evolved to the point where now you have...

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. Oh, my God. Gone away. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

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. Yeah, of course. It's like masquerading as education, but instead it's just ads. Oh, and they did those movies too. Don't get me wrong. There were like educational films about fragrance and it's just Evian trying to help you figure out what scent you are so you buy from them. Like that's a normal thing too. But again, they've never gone away. As soon as there's a form of media, it 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 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. Yeah.

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. Oh, it's such like a.

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 yeah maybe everything will have calmed down by then

One can hope. So 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 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 football coaches taught history because all that was...

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, OK, cool. What am I learning? Like what am I learning?

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? And then he would go, just memorize the formula. Teach me when I'm going to want to measure a flagpole and why. 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. 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 memorize,

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. Yeah. 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. 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 divvied between school.

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 so much of you being taught about the world and who you are and what you're experiencing by merely existing is

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

It's online. You got to 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. We sure did. 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

And back to basics like recitation for education because we can't keep losing to the Russians. And looking at that in our current landscape where it's like, yeah, I mean, ideally, we want 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...

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

So for classroom films that 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. I have a favorite, which is like a 1980s example. Oh, hit me. Called Good Kids Die Too. Yeah.

Yeah. What's it about? 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 very simple plot, but it's effective. I mean, I remember being in dare and they'd be like, hey, do you like Nirvana? Do you like Kurt Cobain? Yeah.

Yeah. Heroin. You can OD on heroin the very first time you do heroin, unlike other drugs where you'll die eventually. Oh, my God. OK, 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 to.

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 yeah i mean that's what sells for yourselves well it is

Well, it is true. I mean, I do buy a lot of it. So, yeah. I mean, 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. 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. I mean, kind of. I mean, it just became too unignorable once you get to the 60s. Like the idea of everything being perfect is...

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. Um,

I tried to figure out like why the classroom 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. And come 1970, pretty much like it's done. It's like absolutely that's it. And I tried to figure out like,

OK, 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. OK, 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 moving pictures outside of a movie theater isn't quite as effective as it was back in the day. No, that's not it. OK, what is it? And the fact of the matter is it stopped working. That's it. They weren't effective anymore. Yeah.

They stopped being compelling. 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. Huh.

The world as it is doesn't fit in a neat little package anymore like classroom films wanted to be. That's interesting. It was unavoidable. It was never going to 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. 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. 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 information isn't

And 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 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. Yeah. Anything else? I feel like that. Yeah, that's beautiful. It's a beautiful tale. Yeah, I don't know. 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 check them out. Well, and where can people get more Harmony Colangelo in their lives? If you want to hear me talk about all kinds of teen media, not usually this old, because we tend to stop at the 70s in most cases, you could find my podcast, The Sends a Prom, which I do with my lovely wife over where you get your podcasts and follow us on social medias.

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. Well, thank you for coming on to talk about teens and just try to make sense of the world through Kiksh. It's my favorite way to do it. And I love doing it with you. 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 don't all do that. That's not all they do with their leisure. And if you are drag racing and getting pregnant the whole time, you still have a rich inner life, you know? Honestly, like sounds cool as hell. Exactly. Thank you for being with us and drag racing through time. Oh, thank you.

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.

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.