Chris said:

You know what the point of injecting trash into our bodies is? Keep us in a constant state of sickness so we need to buy more drugs. This is all profit driven. These are companies making money off of your body.

Dr. Jonas Salk made no money from the polio vaccine though he might have been able to make a fortune from it. Too bad he wasn’t given the Nobel Prize, he deserved it.

However, you are wrong about them being so transparent as propaganda or advertising for the audience they were intended for. People were just not that sophisticated at the time.

That does not take away from the fact that the information and footage in it is not complete BS. For example, I’ve seen a lot from Bell Labs which are really excellent scientific documentaries in their own right. Yes, they’re peppered with the obligatory “From the hard working people of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company” and mentions of “these fine Western Electric products.” Yet despite those plugs, it shows some great stuff about the developments at Bell Labs in the 1950’s.

But you get that from any promotional material or trade group even today. If anything, I think it was a little less of a concern then, because the message is so obvious and transparent. I don’t see how anyone could not be aware that they were getting an advertisement thrown in.

What strikes me as a little ironic is that if you look at many of these, it’s obvious they were mass produced and they cranked these out from a 16mm cutting room with standard issue optical printers and they probably never thought much of them at the time as being really historically significant. I really doubt that when these were made anyone gave a second thought to the fact that in 40 years they’d be considered a national treasure.

I see them as real historically priceless. It’s not even the complete edit of the film as much as the footage it contains. The fact that there was someone who took a movie camera and documented on film how the vaccine was produced in the early years or that there is film footage of the early satellite communications experiments or of the construction of various projects in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

There are some great ones on TV technology from then 1940’s. They were made by RCA and NBC and such, and obviously were designed to make them look extra rosy as companies. Still, the early television recordings they have and the demonstrations of how the first generation of transmitters worked is just amazing.

        drbuzz0 said:

To say it was indoctrination seems to sell it a little short, IMHO.

The word is a bit pejorative perhaps, but that was the times, and yes much of what was being pushed at us was probably for our own good.

With so many media outlets these days, all competing for eyeballs it is hard to realize that there was a time when informing the public was taken very seriously by governments. They had seen how propaganda had been used by all sides in WWII, and understood just how powerful a tool they had at hand.

Yes, most of it was good and the rest harmless, but do not for a moment thing it wasn’t calculated to sway public opinion. The subtext of the piece at hand here, is how we can all trust the big corporations, because they have our best interests in mind. It doesn’t have to be heavy-handed agitprop theater to qualify as propaganda.

This has no impact today because we have all been desensitized by by the continual flood of information, and more importantly advertising, that we have been exposed to. It takes much more effort to sway the public now.

        DV82XL said:

Oh yes, and the point of these types of films was indoctrination. We were fed a lot of propaganda in the schools in those days, and there were always a few times every year that I recall being marched into the auditorium to spend an hour watching a set of government mandated short films like the one featured.

I’ve seen a lot of the films in the Prelinger Archive and elsewhere and there are obviously some which are political propaganda, like anti-communist stuff, for example or ones that come down to being little more than social engineering attempts. (Not that the anti-communism propaganda actually lies or anything, as in most cases, they didn’t need to)

To say it was indoctronation seems to sell it a little short, IMHO. Of the films I’ve seen, quite a few were really excellent when it came to topics of science. A little dated, yes, but many were made by the NSF, NASA, the Atomic Energy Agency and even by the Department of Defense and had very good information and footage (today, the footage is not just good, it’s historically priceless) of radar installations, the Shippingport Reactor, early computers, biological laboratories.

There were some films made in the 1950’s on quackery which are amazingly relevant today. You could remake the exact same film and just change the clothing styles and replace a few dated lines like “gee whiz, that sounds swell” and it would be a perfect film for today. One of them was a film about people convinced that they could stay healthy from a doctor who told them that they only had to “live naturally” and get their nutrition and medical needs from some detoxifying herbal tea blends he sold. Sound familiar? That one is a message I’d love to see our schools still put out to students!

I’d put this one on the list of quality science films. Yes, it has some level of propaganda and pushes a very positive view of Pfizer, but it’s really a great look inside the laboratories and production process.

When I look at many of these films, I’m less surprised at just how good the science was in some cases with topics that we have been lead to believe are more “modern” things that only have developed a full understanding recently. I also like how hands-on they usually portray science and show the practical applications.

I realize that there’s a fine line to walk when it comes to promoting and persuading students to views that the government mandates, but in the case of the above film, I don’t see any reason why there should not be an active effort to promote the use of vaccines and the appreciation of their effectiveness.

By the way: Audio visual material is still common in the classroom (or was when I was in school) but films have been replaced by video tape and the simplicity of video has meant that the schools no longer need a dedicated A/V department. Usually the TV’s and VCR’s are on movable carts that a teacher can have for the day or more from the library or some other central location. The usability of video tape made it possible for teachers to bring in their own material that they recorded off of tv or something if they wanted.

When I graduated from the public schools, DVD’s were still a high end technology and VHS was the primary means of playing videos. I don’t recall any DVD players in my school, but that may be different now. One thing I do remember is that in the early 1990’s, my middle school science department invested in quite a bit of material on laser disc and the players. For the time, it was great, because you could skip to scenes and freeze-frame things like microscope slides and such. Of course, it would not be long before that became an obsolete footnote of technology.

Film strips (at least when I was in school) are still in use, but I doubt they make new ones. They had a lot left over from the 1980’s or earlier.

        Chem Geek Gregor said:

It seems like it might be geared to schools, but it still seems kinda strange, thinking about how cumbersome it would be to always be showing films in a classroom, threading the film into the projector and everything.

That’s exactly how it was done. Every school had at least one if not more 16mm projectors, classrooms had blackout curtains and pull down screens in the front of the class. Being able to operate one of these machines was a skill all teachers had in those days, and yes the movies all had sound, and some projectors had wide-screen lenses.

Movies were a regular feature in the classroom, and there were big central libraries maintained by school-boards.

We also had filmstrips that were linked to a tape recorder such that the film would be advanced in time with the narration – something like a PowerPoint type of presentation.

Most high schools had its A/V department with at least one full time employee, and a squad of student volunteers.

You don’t hear as much about the March Of Dimes anymore. They originally were dedicated to eradicating polio and since have achieved that, so now they have a new mission statement to improve all infant and early childhood health and reduce birth defects and premature birth.

The fact that their profile is lower and their mission broader is part of their being a victim of their own success (not that this is a bad thing). It is hard to explain in modern terms the kind of effort and importance that the mission to overcome polio had.