Movies/Shows/Educational Films you were shown when you were a kid at school.

nothing freaked me out more than marching into the auditorium for "health class" and watching this gem. not for the faint of heart!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bs_KTNcU4Z4

this old chestnut. feel like everyone in the u.s. of a certain age had to watch it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=387nRTNV964

they showed us this too after it aired on t.v. (at least they didn't make us watch Threads...)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOPaaHSjMcw

*Apaches* is the one I remember. Gave me brutal nightmares. "Six school friends in a rural village play out their game of Apaches, using the vast countryside and the farmland as their playground. But unbeknownst to them the countryside can be a trecherous place and soon the children discover just how dangerous it can really be."

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8pzl1k

Directed by "Long Good Friday" John Mackenzie.

such an indelible memory of watching Romeo and Juliet when i was a little kid with the whole school and thanks to olivia hussey i discovered that i enjoyed looking at boobs! #thirdgrade #boobage #olivia4ever

we watched Bedknobs and Broomsticks with the whole school too. that was fun.

damn, now i want to watch Apaches!

shoot, they don't have the whole thing on youtube. it's an educational film! yeesh. anyway, spoiler alert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_we-3Uqu5sw

The one that I'll never forget was a short film of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery in grade 8. We were in a pod, with three classes; they showed it to us without any introduction at all. It was a provocation--forcing us to explain why we thought it was "stupid" or cruel or whatever--and it worked.

Probably this version, but not 100% sure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikaJ_sX1rIA

I had never heard of “Apaches.” Holy crap…

Here’s the film we were made to watch in driver’s Ed class.

Yes, I’m old.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAYj9GGzrPU

oh god, yeah, The Lottery. so creepy. we watched that in English class.

shoot, they don't have the whole thing on youtube.

Chinaski posted a dailymotion link with the whole film... it's worth watching.

Building Sites Bite was the other UK one every kid was shown, doesn't seem to be on YouTube unfortunately. I recall a foolish child slipping off a mud-caked sewer pipe he was walking along and a close-up on the resultant wedge of skull/brain matter. Although not mentioned here so possibly it was another building sites PIF? There were probably a few!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_Sites_Bite

Pretty sure I saw Stand and Deliver 5 times during middle & high school.

"Chinaski posted a dailymotion link with the whole film"

oh i missed that...TY...will watch...

Don't remember what it was called, but all the elementary schools were sent to an auditorium to watch a movie about how to behave on the bus. I remember that one kid in the film held a mouse in front of the driver's face and she crashed the bus, sending a pocket knife through another kid's cheek

oh also remember watching the Challenger shuttle crash in real time... that was a cheerful afternoon

Future Shock with Orson Welles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkUwXenBokU

Building Sites Bite was the other UK one every kid was shown

There's one called Seven Green Bottles you can find on youtube, it's pretty awesome.. the kids are just horrible hooligans, and one by one they take it too far

We watched Dead Is Dead in 6th grade, plus another antidrug film with actual puking iirc. Freaked me out, and I guess kind of effective?

Apparently a lot of kids were shown this crushingly sad film made by Barbara Loden - I think I may have been, but mostly suppressed the memory until I saw it some years ago at a screening of Barbara Loden films

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIWqLZdF-28

slightly better quality version of Apaches: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8mjuqg

Who can forget this little gem, such a well-made film.. I fondly remember the rattle of the 16mm projector

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5142c492e4b037dd5e21db49/1392018237071-4J0M88YBB6XFV8TMXQQ9/Le-ballon-rouge-little-girl.jpg

There's a scene in The Red Balloon where Pascal is locked in a little room at school and I remember wishing they would lock me in a little room like that

I grew up in the countryside, and I too remember Apaches, particularly the kid falling into the slurry pit. If nothing else, the film taught me that cats don't need to wear a gas mask outdoors because cats don't breathe.

No, hang on. That was Bad Boy Bubby. The other classic terrifying public information film, from a few years earlier, was Lonely Water:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZWD2sDRESk

A while back I heard a kind of ambient house track built on a sample of a woman singing "something something dark water", pronounced wadder, and I can't remember what it was. I remember that the sample repeated all the way throughout and it didn't really go anywhere. She had a high-pitched voice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4D6Vx8XHMu0

This is about the construction of a bridge that connects my hometown to a neighboring town. It's the only link across the waterway so it's quite important. We definitely watched this on a film projector in the 1980s. The narrator's voice is so perfect for the genre, when I rediscovered it on youtube I screeched out loud and immediately shared it with as many friends from home as I could.

I remember an anti-teenage-drinking film that was centered around a bunch of teens having a party, and a detail that stuck was that they were all drinking an unfamiliar brand of beer called Padre. In fact it was a real brand, but mainly sold on the West Coast. I remember another film - or maybe it was the same film - where there's a sweaty Grand Funk Railroad-type stoner rock band playing instrumental jams at a teen party. Almost certainly an anti-drug or anti-drinking film.

Feel like I saw Paddle to the Sea multiple times in the 70s, maybe something they showed when it was pissing rain on the playground

https://haphazardstuff.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Paddle-To-The-Sea-1966-childrens-book-short-film.jpg

"held a mouse in front of the driver's face and she crashed the bus, sending a pocket knife through another kid's cheek"

whoever was writing these things was having fun!

Future Shock predicted that both same-sex marriage and extreme bodily modification would eventually become mainstream ideas.

In 10th grade, the cool English and History teachers co-taught a Humanities class. My favorite class except for the day they showed us Soldier Blue and traumatized us all.

On the flipside, I probably saw Donald Duck in Mathmagicland 3 or 4 times in grade school.

As I often do, I will again point out that 20 years from now, Clemenza's former students will be trying to remember the Godard and Scorsese and Lynch and Akerman clips they saw in grade 6.

(Also wondering why they don't know anything about science, but I'll leave that for another thread.)

think i watched this around 6th grade... a little scared to rewatch as it will hit way too close to home

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qlBC45jk3I

Good way to waste a minute

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ygdAlbdcCs

I don't remember any of the educational films specifically but 3rd to 5th grade science classes remain the only times I've seen a laserdisc in use.

The only non-educational film I clearly remember is when my sophomore journalism teacher got mad that we didn't treat the death of Princess Diana with the appropriate amount of respect so she made us watch One Fine Day (starring George Clooney and Michelle Pfeiffer) and write a review of it. No idea how that was a punishment.

Vague memories of a 7th grade anti-drug movie that involved a kid trying PCP for the first time and jumping off a building. Our DARE program was hyperfocused on angel dust (presumably because the cops thought it would give us superpowers) but failed to even mention the drug that took out the biggest chunk of my classmates (meth).

i remember a pcp scare movie with a kid jumping. on abc or some network.

i think this was the one i saw.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBBAqoaZGgQ

on the other hand, one year earlier there was helen hunt jumping out a window on crank.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl7-fxVnDZw

when i got sent to a fucked up kid school the dorm i lived in was supposedly named after a kid who had died jumping out a window on acid. and no it wasn't art linkletter's daughter.

for driver's ed our teacher showed us the car accident scenes from Faces of Death.

!!!!!!