← You're Wrong About
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- [00:00]
Sarah 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. Welcome to youo 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 Colangulo. 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. 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 dot 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.
- [02:13]
Harmony Colangelo
This book. 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.
- [02:45]
Sarah Marshall
Welcome to yorong 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.
- [03:00]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [03:10]
Sarah 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.
- [03:22]
Harmony Colangelo
Maybe just like this idea of novelty, novelty, like this very innocent way of novelty and a childlike wonder and how that goes wrong.
- [03:31]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah, well. And I suspect that you're bringing back some of our ability to feel wonder about these things too.
- [03:37]
Harmony Colangelo
I try.
- [03:38]
Sarah Marshall
Well, and 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?
- [03:56]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [04:04]
Sarah 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?
- [04:46]
Harmony Colangelo
So the way that teenagers then at the time known as teen agers, you know, as a more broad, weirdly impersonal term.
- [04:56]
Sarah Marshall
Why must I be a teenager in love? Famously.
- [04:59]
Harmony Colangelo
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 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.
- [05:28]
Sarah Marshall
Like Molly, the American Girl.
- [05:30]
Harmony Colangelo
Yes, I take your word for that. I wouldn't know. Is that Molly's whole thing?
- [05:34]
Sarah 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? Because, like everyone else got to do Something extremely relevant. Her moment in time.
- [05:58]
Harmony Colangelo
Teens can do anything. I believe in it. Teens can do anything, including being boring.
- [06:03]
Sarah Marshall
That's true. That's true. You make a good point.
- [06:06]
Harmony Colangelo
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 at the time, not a very good time for the United States economically. These kids have never known peace. They've never known anything.
- [06:22]
Sarah Marshall
All they've done is stockpiled rubber.
- [06:24]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [06:53]
Sarah Marshall
From Europe with a bunch of stories he'll never tell to anyone until the day he dies.
- [06:59]
Harmony Colangelo
Oh, I. I'd like to think he swapped stories with his war buddies.
- [07:02]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah, right.
- [07:02]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [07:08]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah, it is. Because 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 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.
- [07:26]
Harmony Colangelo
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. 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 out like that is what teen culture largely is. Bu. And when you're in a war and an economic decline. You don't have that luxury. 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.
- [08:26]
Sarah Marshall
It's just big band music which everyone is supposed to freak out to equally.
- [08:29]
Harmony Colangelo
Yeah, so. Exactly, 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.
- [08:42]
Sarah Marshall
I. I choose to believe that's the case. 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. Monkey is played by Judy Garland. 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.
- [09:15]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [09:28]
Sarah Marshall
Even if there's witches. In fact, especially if there are.
- [09:31]
Harmony Colangelo
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 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.
- [10:39]
Sarah Marshall
I guess if we must have government propaganda, I'd like it to be about tourniquets.
- [10:43]
Harmony Colangelo
Yeah, like, see, that's. 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, so there's a lot of. This is the core backbone of like 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.
- [11:21]
Sarah Marshall
Mental hygiene is a phrase that I've always found both delightful and creepy.
- [11:25]
Harmony Colangelo
It's very alarming. Like the idea is that there were hygiene films where it's like co, 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.
- [12:11]
Sarah Marshall
Rapid mass learning. I like that it sounds like a monorail.
- [12:14]
Harmony Colangelo
It sounds. 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 in person it's such like the stereotype of schools being like a conveyor belt to pump children along, teach them how to work a 9 to 5 job and then ship them off to a factory.
- [12:31]
Sarah 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's grist for some kind of economic mill. And it's like, you know, even if you're doing something less evil. Wicked. This point at 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, it's.
- [13:07]
Harmony Colangelo
It's very clinical and clinical.
- [13:09]
Sarah Marshall
Like the way you talk about a lab rat kind of.
- [13:12]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [13:22]
Sarah 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.
- [13:46]
Harmony Colangelo
We got to be better than the Nazis.
- [13:49]
Sarah Marshall
The Nazis made eugenics look really bad. So we're just going to do it quietly now for a while. But, like, you can see how the, you know, 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.
- [14:06]
Harmony Colangelo
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 intentional. 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?
- [14:27]
Sarah 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-20s 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 80s, felt kind of early 80s 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.
- [15:29]
Harmony Colangelo
Yeah, it's cheesy, but it was effective because now you at least have the fear of the consequences in mind. Right.
- [15:37]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah, it worked. It worked at the job. It set out for itself.
- [15:40]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [16:04]
Sarah 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 won cursive yet.
- [16:21]
Harmony Colangelo
Right. Like, there's so many ways that I just feel like we manipulate children. Some of my co workers 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 front of the school and just like, be like, look, here's gruesome death. All of your classmates could be dead just like this.
- [16:53]
Sarah 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, I mean, it's.
- [17:29]
Harmony Colangelo
The only information you have and you haven't quite figured out to the extent that, like, yes, adults will lie to you.
- [17:34]
Sarah 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 at the time. So it's like adults using the kind of bluntest instrument they can use to try and communicate with adolescence. 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.
- [17:59]
Harmony Colangelo
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 go 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 canon in America because it is actually the first time that teens emotions were ever really acknowledged on a wide scale, certainly academically.
- [18:50]
Sarah Marshall
How depressing. And yet I'm like, yep, that feels right. Tell me more about that.
- [18:54]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [19:18]
Sarah Marshall
I think this is how Georgia are well talked about history being taught also, you know, different example, but in English public schools. Yeah.
- [19:26]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [19:43]
Sarah Marshall
Clearly not. Or at least, you know, we didn't make enough cautionary films about it or whatever works.
- [19:49]
Harmony Colangelo
No, we had to go, rah, rah, rah D day. We saved the day. Go America.
- [19:55]
Sarah Marshall
Americans are good.
- [19:56]
Harmony Colangelo
Right?
- [19:57]
Sarah Marshall
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.
- [20:15]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [20:25]
Sarah Marshall
Wow. They communicate incredible. They do move in herds.
- [20:29]
Harmony Colangelo
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 entire 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 during this era, juvenile delinquency was seen as one of the biggest epidemics in America that we couldn't quite solve.
- [21:20]
Sarah Marshall
And what is juvenile delinquency? While we're on the subject?
- [21:24]
Harmony Colangelo
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. 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.
- [21:46]
Sarah Marshall
I've heard that, yeah. Although in Buffy, you know, they do challenge that premise a little. 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?
- [22:06]
Harmony Colangelo
That is absolutely a factor.
- [22:08]
Sarah Marshall
Thank you for asking.
- [22:10]
Harmony Colangelo
So in the wake of World War II, the economy is booming. The best thing to ever happened to America was World War II.
- [22:17]
Sarah Marshall
Nothing like taking out all the other economic superpowers at once, you know?
- [22:21]
Harmony Colangelo
Right. It's just Last Man Standing worked out really well for us from financial standpoint.
- [22:26]
Sarah Marshall
Let's not think about the other standpoints too much.
- [22:28]
Harmony Colangelo
Precisely. So these teens who have never known or even heard tales of a time where they could not be in horrible financial ruin.
- [22:37]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah.
- [22:38]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [22:54]
Sarah Marshall
Somewhere that's green, if you will. Right.
- [22:59]
Harmony Colangelo
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 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.
- [24:32]
Sarah 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.
- [24:39]
Harmony Colangelo
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 Brand. 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 way that rock and roll ended up going in the latter half of the 1950s where you have the Day the Music died, where Richie 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.
- [25:19]
Sarah 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 doesn't be in here, of course.
- [25:28]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [25:37]
Sarah Marshall
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 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 the sense of 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.
- [26:19]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [26:30]
Sarah Marshall
We're not having a great Depression anymore. There's a chicken in the pot.
- [26:33]
Harmony Colangelo
Yeah. Like, it's arguably the best America's ever been. Like, you're upset for it.
- [26:39]
Sarah Marshall
Right.
- [26:39]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [27:17]
Sarah 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.
- [27:36]
Harmony Colangelo
Like, yeah, it was a third space.
- [27:38]
Sarah Marshall
Right. 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.
- [27:50]
Harmony Colangelo
Yeah. I mean, the equivalent that you would have is, like, essentially it's a teenage version of a bar, you know.
- [27:56]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah.
- [27:56]
Harmony Colangelo
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. Yeah, I see. I've seen these educational films which, like, they're so silly, where it's just like, these things of, like, 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 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.
- [28:51]
Sarah Marshall
Treat every day like prom.
- [28:53]
Harmony Colangelo
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. 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.
- [29:22]
Sarah Marshall
Okay. I'm glad the word kid was at the end of that sentence. It was stressful for a second.
- [29:27]
Harmony Colangelo
It was not Dad's friend. No. It was his kid.
- [29:30]
Sarah Marshall
I mean, you never know because there's also the Bachelor and the bobby socks are only a few years away from the unpleasantness.
- [29:36]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [29:54]
Sarah Marshall
I decide who you mate with. Gig shit.
- [29:56]
Harmony Colangelo
Yeah, exactly. And I think that that is just a fascinating evolution to look about 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.
- [30:10]
Sarah 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? Because you. I think that, like, a lot of people approximately our age and younger maybe grow 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.
- [30:36]
Harmony Colangelo
Yeah. 911 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.
- [30:45]
Sarah Marshall
Right? It was, like, for freaks. And now it's like, nobody has any clue how to meet if it's not 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.
- [31:00]
Harmony Colangelo
I mean, I met my wife on Tinder, so worked out okay for me.
- [31:03]
Sarah 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 in a happy couple met on Tinder. But now we have to find a new way because Tinder is terrible now.
- [31:16]
Harmony Colangelo
I mean, I've heard. I've heard Bumble's bad. I've heard so many of them are just also unusable and bad.
- [31:22]
Sarah Marshall
I think we should all just start cruising each other at laundromats like people did in the 70s, as far as I can tell.
- [31:28]
Harmony Colangelo
Yeah.
- [31:28]
Sarah 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 rule book to follow, then people just sort of seem to have no idea how to proceed.
- [31:52]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [32:02]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah, I haven't heard that one in a while. We go through slang so quickly now.
- [32:06]
Harmony Colangelo
People have gone feral.
- [32:07]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah, I don't know.
- [32:09]
Harmony Colangelo
I think there is something to have 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. Now. So, like, maybe a general sense of chilling out would be cool or I.
- [32:25]
Sarah Marshall
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 decades 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, you know.
- [32:59]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [33:08]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah.
- [33:09]
Harmony Colangelo
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. 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.
- [33:36]
Sarah Marshall
Okay.
- [33:37]
Harmony Colangelo
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. At the very least, adults were fearful that they weren't right.
- [34:03]
Sarah Marshall
And like, what is the Leave it to Beaver pass that people were insisting on, you know, creating the illusion of at the time?
- [34:12]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [34:31]
Sarah Marshall
Right, right. It's interesting how much our dream of who we were coincides with the invention of the sitcom where, 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 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 as 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.
- [35:46]
Harmony Colangelo
Seeing it directly. Yeah, it changed a lot of things. Yeah.
- [35:50]
Sarah 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 just love sitcoms, but it feels a little telling, you know?
- [36:23]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [36:30]
Sarah 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.
- [36:45]
Harmony Colangelo
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 Hays 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 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, 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. 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.
- [38:03]
Sarah Marshall
They're going to be partying down to the hygiene film.
- [38:06]
Harmony Colangelo
Yeah, they're not going to 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 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, 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 superintendent's 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.
- [39:41]
Sarah Marshall
Like he'll buy. He'll buy a two copies of don't tape notes to the superintendent's ass.
- [39:48]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [39:58]
Sarah 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.
- [40:06]
Harmony Colangelo
I have a book in front of me. It's a phenomenal little read from the late 90s called Mental Hygiene Classroom Films 1945-1970. 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.
- [40:20]
Sarah Marshall
Oh no, Ken.
- [40:21]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [40:31]
Sarah Marshall
What? I love the lucky day.
- [40:33]
Harmony Colangelo
Let's see here. Make your home safe. Oh, Lunchroom manners. Mother max puppies and find happy homes. Parents are people too.
- [40:43]
Sarah Marshall
Oh, yeah, I've heard that.
- [40:44]
Harmony Colangelo
Patterns of smartness. The political process. Snap out of it. Sniffles and sneezes. Oh, Skipper learns a lesson.
- [40:52]
Sarah Marshall
Oh, no.
- [40:54]
Harmony Colangelo
Student government at work. Subject narcotics.
- [40:59]
Sarah Marshall
That's a fun one.
- [41:00]
Harmony Colangelo
Toward emotional maturity. Too young to burn.
- [41:04]
Sarah Marshall
What? What's that one?
- [41:07]
Harmony Colangelo
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 in children are shown using magic marker. Cartoon illustrations, not live actors.
- [41:27]
Sarah Marshall
That's probably good. Yeah.
- [41:29]
Harmony Colangelo
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. So yeah. What. What about alcoholism? What about prejudice?
- [41:43]
Sarah Marshall
What about Bob?
- [41:44]
Harmony Colangelo
There are some movies in here, 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.
- [42:07]
Sarah Marshall
Do we have any sense of like these being successful or was it more that they sort of created an economy?
- [42:13]
Harmony Colangelo
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. So a lot of, 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 of this time. And how often they were shown is 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 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.
- [43:43]
Sarah 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 like Niagara Falls, they're gonn kill.
- [44:18]
Harmony Colangelo
Us all, they're too horny.
- [44:20]
Sarah Marshall
It feels like that that Beatle mania in retrospect represented a moment for American parents of like, never mind, we can't train them to be any different than they are.
- [44:30]
Harmony Colangelo
I mean, they certainly tried to some degree, but it ultimately, I think, like, there's a whole lot of, like, children are supposed to be seen, not heard about it.
- [44:38]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah. And girls just want to chase boys around while screaming the whole time.
- [44:43]
Harmony Colangelo
Like, for real, though, I've. I've seen A Hard Day's Night. That's just kind of all it is.
- [44:46]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah.
- [44:47]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [45:05]
Sarah Marshall
Of course, it makes me think of even, like, you know, the Shangri Las.
- [45:09]
Harmony Colangelo
Love the Shangri Las.
- [45:11]
Sarah 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 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 rocking.
- [45:32]
Harmony Colangelo
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, is just like the oh, no song. Like, those are these big things about big experiences. And there's like these little dramatic mini operas.
- [45:52]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah, they are mini operas.
- [45:54]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [46:05]
Sarah Marshall
And maybe you'd like them to kick your ass.
- [46:07]
Harmony Colangelo
They're so cool. I mean, how would you not.
- [46:09]
Sarah 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.
- [46:24]
Harmony Colangelo
Absolutely.
- [46:25]
Sarah Marshall
Doesn't Beatlemania, to use an old Twitter joke template, imply the existence of Beatle depression? Take us.
- [46:34]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [46:47]
Sarah 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?
- [46:53]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [47:07]
Sarah Marshall
Oh, good.
- [47:08]
Harmony Colangelo
However, there is a dark side to that in moderation.
- [47:12]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah.
- [47:13]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [47:37]
Sarah Marshall
Are you ugly beyond.
- [47:39]
Harmony Colangelo
Yes, 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 like, direct way that it had not been direct before. Yeah.
- [47:55]
Sarah Marshall
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, 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.
- [48:34]
Harmony Colangelo
I, 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, 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 ablaze and 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 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.
- [49:32]
Sarah Marshall
Other to do, as so many of us did. Yeah, that was.
- [49:35]
Harmony Colangelo
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. 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 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. 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. Be equally as important.
- [50:28]
Sarah Marshall
Well, that's what went wrong with Oliver Stone and Wall Street.
- [50:32]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [50:44]
Sarah 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.
- [50:50]
Harmony Colangelo
No, totally.
- [50:52]
Sarah Marshall
Ah, 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.
- [51:19]
Harmony Colangelo
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 a lot of this type of education. You know, the more dogmatic stuff become, you know, mail order VHS that they play in Sunday school. I watched a bunch of stuff like this. Like that was a normal thing.
- [51:49]
Sarah Marshall
We get into anti satanic panic education at this point.
- [51:53]
Harmony Colangelo
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 tick tock 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.
- [52:19]
Sarah Marshall
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.
- [52:36]
Harmony Colangelo
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 figure help you figure out what scent you are. So you buy from them. Like that's a normal thing too. Yeah, but again, they've never gone away.
- [52:48]
Sarah Marshall
As soon as there's a form of media will reliably be used 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 in the most benign way you could put it, is that you go and kind of as you were saying about roach 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, 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.
- [54:05]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [54:15]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah, maybe everything will have calmed down by then.
- [54:21]
Harmony Colangelo
One can hope 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.
- [54:47]
Sarah Marshall
Like, sorry about the brain damage. Read this chapter again. The answers are in the back of your edition.
- [54:52]
Harmony Colangelo
Yeah, exactly. And then we just watch some movie that they like or nine hours of Band of Brothers. This teacher, though, with the cauliflowered 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 30ft away from a flagpole, you can use angles to figure out how tall the flagpole is. And I go, that's not. What am I going to use that. What? 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.
- [55:35]
Sarah Marshall
Teach me when I'm gonna want to measure a flagpole and why.
- [55:39]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [55:45]
Sarah 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 memor 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 yeah, yeah. I. 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.
- [56:13]
Harmony Colangelo
What these films were trying to stress was that most of a kid's coming of age is sprint spent in a classroom. Classroom. Right. That is where you will probably spend most of your waking hours when you're in school. Because the math breaks down is like roughly 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours at school, 8 hours divvied 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, a 30 to 1 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 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 a school's job to teach you things.
- [57:06]
Sarah Marshall
Right. Yeah. And the question of whose job it is, it's whoever you can get at this point. Yeah.
- [57:15]
Harmony Colangelo
So. So there's a lovely dissertation that I really liked when researching this poll topic for this episode. It's called Hot Rods, Shy Guys and Sex Kittens. Social Guidance Films in the American High School 1947-1957 by Michelle Ann Boolean. 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.
- [57:48]
Sarah Marshall
We sure did.
- [57:49]
Harmony Colangelo
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 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.
- [58:56]
Sarah Marshall
So what comes of that in this kind of evolving form?
- [59:01]
Harmony Colangelo
So for classroom films that it. 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. To really pick up leading into the 1960s. And this coincides with, like, the death of rock and roll and every other disturbance thing that is happening at the time.
- [59:35]
Sarah Marshall
I have a favorite which is like a 1980s example.
- [59:39]
Harmony Colangelo
Oh, hit me.
- [59:39]
Sarah Marshall
Called Good Kids Die too. Yeah.
- [59:43]
Harmony Colangelo
What's it about?
- [59:44]
Sarah 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 very simple plot, but it's effective.
- [59:59]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [60:13]
Sarah Marshall
Oh, my God. Okay. So basically, we have moved from a controlling and 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 basic life skills 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.
- [60:55]
Harmony Colangelo
Yeah, I mean, that's what sells. Fear sells.
- [61:01]
Sarah Marshall
Well, it is true. I mean, I do buy a lot of it.
- [61:04]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [61:17]
Sarah 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.
- [61:27]
Harmony Colangelo
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 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, 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.
- [62:45]
Sarah Marshall
They stopped being compelling.
- [62:47]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [63:14]
Sarah Marshall
That's interesting.
- [63:16]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [63:24]
Sarah Marshall
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.
- [63:42]
Harmony Colangelo
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.
- [64:18]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah. Anything else? I feel like that. Yeah. That's beautiful. It's a beautiful tale.
- [64:23]
Harmony Colangelo
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 avgeek website has like, like thousands and thousands of them archived. So, like, go, go check them out.
- [64:42]
Sarah Marshall
Well, and where can people get more Harmony Calangulo in their lives?
- [64:47]
Harmony Colangelo
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 Sense of Prom, which I do with my lovely wife, over where you get your podcast and follow us on social media medias. And I'm personally over on Instagram @velocitraptor or on bluesky armonycolangelo, because apparently I'm not allowed to have underscores over there, so I had to use my real name.
- [65:13]
Sarah Marshall
Well, thank you for coming on to talk about teens and just try to make sense of the world through Kik. It's my favorite way to do it and I love doing it with you.
- [65:23]
Harmony Colangelo
Oh, thank you for having me and allowing me to have disorganized thoughts about. About the way these films are not evil and teens also 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.
- [65:43]
Sarah Marshall
And even if you are drag racing and getting pregnant the whole time, you still have a rich inner life, you know.
- [65:48]
Harmony Colangelo
Honestly, like. Sounds cool as hell.
- [65:50]
Sarah Marshall
Exactly. Thank you for. For being with us and drag racing through time.
- [65:56]
Harmony Colangelo
Oh, thank you.
- [66:03]
Unknown
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 a 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 time.
- [66:52]
Sarah 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 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.