Classic Educational Shorts: Volume 3: Safe...Not Sorry

Though the era of 16 mm educational cinema has come to a close, those quirky films unspooled in the mid-century American classroom continue to fascinate viewers today. And no group of titles is more popular than the safety films. Presenting scenarios that couldn't be depicted in a textbook or described from a lectern, safety films capitalized on the drama and spectacle of death - lurking around every corner, in every pair of scissors, in every overloaded electrical cord, on every park bench where a stranger pets a puppy. The techniques employed by the fourteen films in this collection include: slapstick comedy (Step Right Up, on ladder safety), docudrama (Our Obligation, a large-scale reenactment a tragic schoolhouse fire), fantasy (Safety: Harm Hides at Home, which features an accident-fighting Wonder Woman knock-off named Guardiana), and animation (Lucky You, from the legendary Jam Handy studios). And no safety collection would be complete without an homage to the "King of Calamity," Sid Davis: The child-molester film Dangerous Stranger and the unintentionally sadistic Live and Learn.

Actor: Doug Edmunds
Actor: Edward Everett Horton