Websnark

Comment from: John Fiala posted at September 30, 2005 12:43 PM

Yeah, I remember the filmstrip. Learning about the Metric System... (for a while there while I was in the Elementary school system, they were Convinced everyone was going to go Metric for Good, and so I still have trouble with 'English' measurements.) Our Friend, the Potato... all that good stuff.

Or, at worst, getting a little nap in during the day. :)

BEEP

Comment from: kirabug posted at September 30, 2005 12:54 PM

And the scariest day was the day that we had to learn about sex ed and they kicked all the boys out of the class and one of the girls had to run the film strip with all pictures of the giant alien cow-head diagram that were, according to the strip, actually parts of our bodies.

Everyone was bright red, but the reddest of all was the girl who had to run the film strip.

Comment from: TheNintenGenius posted at September 30, 2005 12:58 PM

I had a totally awesome 5th grade teacher who actually still used filmstrips and other old film technology in his class sometimes, and this was back in the all-too-recent year of 1996 on top of that. A lot of them were ultra-cheesy, yes, but there's a definite charm to the medium, especially the filmstrips with their narrations of still images punctuated by annoying beeps.

It should come as no surprise that this teacher is the one I consider to be the greatest teacher I ever had, since he also introduced me to such excellent things as Carmen, Enrico Caruso, Our Gang, Buddy Holly, Greco-Roman and Finnish(!!!) mythology, Laurel and Hardy, the Wild West mythos, and the list just goes on indefinitely in equally odd and tangental ways.

Comment from: bzedan posted at September 30, 2005 1:16 PM

We didn't have film-strips, we had slideshows; They were Kodak educational slideshows about photography, colour and light. They used the same beep (tone) that pervaded throughout all follow-along stories or lessons. Remember the read-along story books? At the library you could check out those big earphones and sit in a cubby with a tape player.

Comment from: whymy posted at September 30, 2005 1:34 PM

Dude! My Bio/Physics teacher (I had the guy twice for two different classes) used those things. He would almost always get bored waiting for the beeps and just do the commentary himself.

Comment from: Connor Moran posted at September 30, 2005 1:37 PM

In my school district, I was part of pretty much the dead last generation to have any filmstrips. We had them up through about 4th grade, when all the classrooms got tvs and vcrs. But I think we may have been a little behind the times. I am from Idaho, after all.

It can't duplicate the trippiness of the filmstrip itself, but there is much joy to be found digging through the old public domain filmstrip archives at archive.org. I highly recommend it as a massively timewasting excersize.

Comment from: SeanH posted at September 30, 2005 1:37 PM

The Moon. For several years, she has fascinated many. But will man ever walk on her fertile surface? Democratic hopeful Adlai Stevenson says so.

STEVENSON: I have no objection to man walking on the moon.

By 1964, experts say man will have established twelve colonies on the Moon, ideal for family vacations. Once there, you'll way only a small percentage of what you weigh on Earth. Slow down, tubby! You're not on the Moon yet!

The Moon belongs to America, and anxiously awaits the arrival of our astro-men. Will you be among them?

Comment from: unliz posted at September 30, 2005 1:40 PM

My senior year of high school (also known as LAST YEAR) I took a clothing design class which, apparently, had the same curriculum it did when the teacher took it in 1967. Right down to the sad little film strip explaining business rules with the cheery little white children and the one "negro" and such interesting and informative admonitions as "If a girl is the chair person, refer to her as 'Madam Chairwoman.'"

I kept thinking they should just donate the darn thing to the library and let us have a short lecture on the subject since all the vocational classes had to learn it.

Comment from: 32_footsteps posted at September 30, 2005 2:54 PM

I had those slide shows too. I remember all the boys trying to imitate that beep (which always sounded more like a "boop" to me). Nobody every quite got it right, but it was funny to time it so that we all tried it right around the same time as the actual beep. The teacher would get so distracted that she wouldn't hit the button for the next slide.

I sometimes wonder why I didn't get detention so much; apparently, good grades are a class clown's saving grace.

Comment from: Paul Gadzikowski posted at September 30, 2005 3:12 PM

One time, in what environment I do not recall (prolly high school), I discovered the existence of a make-your-own filmstrip kit. It was a blank filmstrip - there were probably frames preprinted on it, but I don't remember them - and markers to draw your pictures with. I can't, and couldn't then, imagine that one could do very detailed artwork but as a reflexive storyteller I still wanted one of my own.

Comment from: UrsulaV posted at September 30, 2005 3:44 PM

Paul, I've actually done that. Part of some bizarre gifted class I took in elementary school (which was a great class, mind you!) included making our own A/V materials for various research projects, including...filmstrips.

Mostly what we learned is that it's freakin' hard to draw on something that size with markers made for overhead projectors. "Look, it's a blob! Look, it's a...spiky blob...?"

Comment from: yaJ posted at September 30, 2005 4:25 PM

It's edutainment at its finest!
Somewhat unrelated idiot question for you, Eric: What font did you use for the "Brigadier General John Stark" part of your title?

Comment from: Kate Sith posted at September 30, 2005 4:36 PM

Man, don't tell me there are people out there reading this that are too young to remember filmstrips. My poor heart couldn't take it.

Comment from: Chris Anthony posted at September 30, 2005 5:05 PM

Kate, I know exactly what you mean. I'm going back to college, after a long absence and several breaks in the middle when I was here the first time, and - not to pick on him, but - when NintenGenius mentioned being in fifth grade in 1996, my immediate reaction was "wait, he's that young?". And then I thought about it, and did the math, and realized that, no, he's probably a college sophomore.

I'm a college sophomore, at the moment. (If all goes well, I'll be a junior at the end of the semester.)

People who were in fifth grade the year after I graduated from high school are now college sophomores.

Of course, Eric will probably hit me over the head with a cushioned sneaker and tell me that I'm young and I should shut up. But still; it's weird to wrap my head around my immediate social peers being that much younger than I am.

Comment from: whymy posted at September 30, 2005 5:32 PM

heh, I'm 19 and a College Sophomore.

Comment from: SeanH posted at September 30, 2005 5:39 PM

I'm 18 and too lazy to google to find out what "sophomore" means!

Comment from: gwalla posted at September 30, 2005 5:44 PM

We never actually got filmstrips. However, we got plenty of '70s-vintage films with messed-up sound tracks that would morph from low-fi dialogue to awesome sounds. "This is little Johnny. Johnny is about to gblblblbBLBLBLbLBLBLBLBland so..."

We also had semi-animated videos. You know, the ones where the soundtrack is a narrator and ambient noise (with occasional sound effects) over what's basically a slideshow with occasional close-ups on and pans over the image. My high school Latin class had one of the Odyssey. It had the greatest sound effect for a cyclops getting stabbed in the eyeball ever.

Comment from: Eric Burns posted at September 30, 2005 5:54 PM

"Wise Fool."

Comment from: TheNintenGenius posted at September 30, 2005 8:22 PM

Yes, as has been noted, I am indeed a college sophomore, and I turn 20 in December.

Time to make people feel old.

Comment from: TheNintenGenius posted at September 30, 2005 8:22 PM

Yes, as has been noted, I am indeed a college sophomore, and I turn 20 in December.

Time to make people feel old.

Comment from: 32_footsteps posted at September 30, 2005 8:32 PM

I always get confused about whether or not I should feel young or old. In my real life circle of friends, I've fallen into the clique of geeks around the Boston area, and many of them are 4-5 years older than me; I'm the baby of many groups. But then I go online and deal with video gaming circles, and so many of them aren't even old enough to vote yet. I talk to people who started video gaming on the Playstation; I tell them I started on the Atari 2600 and they're amazed to find out Atari once made consoles. Talk about feeling old.

Comment from: Wednesday White posted at September 30, 2005 8:34 PM

Ursula: they had me playing with DIY filmstrips too, back in kindergarten. (They only handled you as a gifted kid if you could do math. Since I couldn't do math, I wasn't gifted. Instead, I had a really weird kindergarten.) ISTR being handed relatively fine-tipped pens for the purpose, though, which I then proceeded to push too hard on.

Spludge.

CLOSET! Off we go!

Comment from: Archon Divinus posted at September 30, 2005 8:59 PM

I never had filmstrips, being way to young (I'm in my first year of university now), but I did get to watch lots of cheesy videos from the 70's. I even had to watch 2 weeks ago in my first chemistry lab. It makes me wonder why no new eduction videos have been made. It's hard to learn when you're laughing at how ridiculous they are.

Comment from: Wednesday White posted at September 30, 2005 9:06 PM

Jeez, isn't watching Degrassi enough for most kids?

Comment from: Archon Divinus posted at September 30, 2005 9:51 PM

I remember watching that too.

Comment from: Chris Anthony posted at September 30, 2005 10:41 PM

32, the 2600? You're still young, padawan. (I still have my Pong home game console somewhere. Now that was truly advanced hardware - you could have two players playing at the same time! Ah, luxury...)

In all seriousness, I'd love to find my old 2600 and dust it off. I never did beat Mountain King...

Comment from: Tevorcet posted at September 30, 2005 10:50 PM

What about the terrible driver's ed videos where you mess around with a steering wheel and nothing happens? Besides the breaks for the bespectacled man to illustrate arcane facets of driving with what appeared to be matchbox cars and a chalkboard, there was also the ever-amusing simultaneous disaster. The hood of the car would fly up at the same time as the brakes (drum brakes, no ABS here) failed and two tires exploded. Of course, the massive boat of a station wagon you were "driving" was, at the time, going 60 MPH, down a mountain hill, with a semi truck coming at it. Considering that there was a narrator, it was like a bad movie serial from the 1940's. Then, of course, you can always get a kick out of seeing that gas apparently costs 20 cents a gallon...

Comment from: Ian K. posted at October 1, 2005 1:19 AM

My biology teacher had an acid flashback or... something weird one day after our projector had finished rewinding.

The clicking drove him mad, I suppose.

He started screaming about danger and destroyed the projector in a diving tackle.

Comment from: AndrewWade posted at October 1, 2005 1:32 AM

Ian... wow. Just wow.

Comment from: Rich Burlew posted at October 1, 2005 1:30 PM

But sometimes, you would need to do a report on something (I had to do one on Greek mythogology in third grade), and you would get the little beige-and-black machine with the lightbulb and the 3" x 5" screen that would let you view the filmstrip AT HOME. The school would give you the old fake-leather carrying case with the machine in it and make you sign it out, and you had to bring it back the next day or the Apocolypse would occur as a direct result.

I have memories of sitting in the corner of my living room with the filmstrip machine plugged in, advancing it along with every BOOP! I remember the moment where I realized that I could stop the tape *whenever I wanted* and view the frames in any order, for as long as I wanted. It was an epiphany.

Comment from: UrsulaV posted at October 1, 2005 5:35 PM

Wednesday--

Oh, lord, I remember I bombed the math section utterly, but my teachers agitated for some kind of retest--possibly I did well on the verbal, but more likely the teacher, a woman of infinite will, had simply decided that This Was The Way It Would Be. So I spent three hours closeted with a caring, but somewhat glazed public servant who administered one of the oddest tests I'd ever taken--completely non-math, but also largely non-verbal (I was fine with verbal) and mostly involving "What is wrong with this picture?" kind of things. And lots of pictures of cows without ears or whatnot. Evidentally I provided sufficient proof of genius in my identifications of cow aural equipment, but two decades later, I'm still kinda scratching my head about that.

Comment from: joeymanley posted at October 1, 2005 5:37 PM

The now-defunct webzine word.com used to do these great slideshows -- proto-webcomics, really -- with an exact replica of that "boop" sound in between screen refreshes. They were great.

Unfortunately, archive.org doesn't seem to have done a very good job of snagging that particular site, and it died long ago in corporate dotcom shenanigans that involved, at one point, a fish oil company owned by the Bush (as in George W.) family. Or something. I forget. Those were some weird days ...

Joey
www.webcomicsnation.com

Comment from: Zaq posted at October 1, 2005 7:09 PM

I'm too young to remember these being used with any regularity (For the record, I'm a college freshman), but I've got this maddening picture in my head of exactly what you're talking about. I'm almost positive that I never saw these in an educational environment (and DEFINITELY never regularly), but I'm also nearly positive that I know what you're talking about as if I had. Not in the sense of "okay, I can imagine what you're describing," but a strange half-memory that I'm reasonable confident I'm not imagining. For the life of me, though, I cannot remember where the hell I would have come in contact with one of these things. Usually I'm willing to admit when I don't know what people are talking about, but there's something about this in particular which makes my brain firmly believe this is not imaginary.

...This is going to bug me, now. It's not the kind of thing one can look up, either (which is probably a good thing... being able to use some utility to search in detail for information about one person's past experiences based only on tiny fragments of memories is a sci-fi horror I'm not comfortable with imagining)... As I said, maddening.

Comment from: Ian K. posted at October 1, 2005 11:44 PM

Zaq -

Hi, I'm Troy McClure. You may remember me from such other educational films as, "Locker Room Towel Fight: the Blinding of Jimmy Driscol," or "Firecrackers: the Silent Killer."

They're great fodder for humor and satire. They use one in "Dodgeball," "the Stepford Wives," and the made fun of them regularly on "MST3K."

Comment from: Merus posted at October 2, 2005 2:36 AM

Ursula: what you describe sounds like an IQ test. Maths and verbal isn't a great way to measure raw intelligence, which is why usually IQ tests, or at least the professional ones, will present you with circumstances they've just made up so you can't get a head-start due to knowledge.

I've never seen a slideshow thingie, as my parents did research into the best schools in the area beforehand and so my primary school had VCRs thanks to all the government funding. Yeah, I also live in a country that doesn't usually treat its public schools like a joke at the expense of the poor. (Although they're getting better at that.)

Comment from: Bo Lindbergh posted at October 2, 2005 3:21 AM

Quoth Tevorcet:

The hood of the car would fly up at the same time as the brakes (drum brakes, no ABS here) failed and two tires exploded.

OK, now I'm reminded of that gem of a workplace safety pamphlet, Staplerfahrer Klaus....

Comment from: Sean Conner posted at October 2, 2005 3:28 AM

Archive.org … what an incredible resource.

Anyway, I do remember film strips. What I remember most about them, other than the beep, was that rarely were they kept in sync with the tape. Who ever was tapped to run the film strip machine would either be one frame ahead, or one frame behind, the audio track (which would drive me crazy).

I also recall one particular film strip based on a chapter from Bradbury's Martian Chronicles; “August 2002: Night Meeting.” It had this really trippy 70s art and this haunting score and I personally would love to see it again.

Ah well …

Comment from: J.(Channing)Wells posted at October 2, 2005 9:21 AM

I loved to run the filmstrip projector.

I am not ashamed to say it now. I loved running the filmstrip projector. In fact, I was really quite fond of the filmstrip projector itself. It was solid and clean and had a nice, heavy metal chassis with textured off-white enamel. Plus, there were only three controls, not counting the built-in tape machine buttons, all of them color-coded to bright, simple colors. The advance control was green. I remember it all very clearly. It was a dream of simplistic user interface, a machine hybrid, light and sound and lenses and metal and damn, I always wanted to be the one to turn its knobs.

And then... one day... we got the automatic filmstrip projector.

Tragedy.

This cutting-edge machine, this pinnacle of filmstrip projector technology, actually had the ability to sense a film-advance beep and ADVANCE ITSELF. Suddenly my expert knob-turning services were no longer needed. The relentless march of Automation had taken from me one of my most favoritest classroom jobs.

Curse you, automatic filmstrip projector. May ye rust where ye have fallen.

Comment from: Wednesday White posted at October 2, 2005 12:47 PM

Ursula: oh, man, weird.

I'm trying to remember what the non-bubblefilling tests were like over the years. I have a completely patchwork/swiss cheese memory up until about the year I turned sixteen. There may have been some flash cards involved.

I suspect things might have been different if I'd been acing math and blowing verbal. I kept running into this attitude that language skills were desperately easy to acquire and maintain, so therefore I either wasn't actually very smart (which, at the end of the day, seemed to be what most people concluded) or I simply wasn't trying hard enough, because Smart Kids Can Do Math. Either way, the schools seemed disinclined to do much else other than pat me on the head and strongly discourage me from entering the advanced English classes ("well, dear, you keep failing math -- you probably can't handle this").

Comment from: John Fiala posted at October 3, 2005 10:50 AM

Wednesday: (I'm not sure how to quote, so I'll just note this in reference to the teachers thinking she wasn't so smart, because 'English is Easy and Math is Hard'.)

That reminds me of an essay I've got from Peter David. For a long time he was writing a monthly column in a comics magazine, called 'But I Digress'. One time he was talking about how artists at a comic book convention get a lot more respect than writers can. He came up with the conclusion that it's because everyone can 'write a story'. Aunt Martha could write a story, if she just sat down and took the time. But everyone knows they can't draw that well. (Well, unless they can, in which case they know how much hard work it takes.) But people don't respect mastery of the English language because everyone is _using_ the english language - so it can't be all that hard.

Which is of course why we have three bestselling authors on every block. *roll eyes*

Comment from: theliel posted at October 3, 2005 12:04 PM

Chris Anthony: i took 8 years to get through college and graduated the year after you, So I know the pain.

Zaq: if you watch Venture Brothers at all, you know EXACTLY what people are talking about (and while Dodgeball, stepford wives and the simpsons make fun of the educational film, to my memory, only venture brothers has gone all out and done the stop-motion slide-at-a-time format for an intro)
for the record: Best. Exposition. Ever.

I remember seeing a actual honest to got film in second grade about boating safty. To be fair i'd been driving grandfather's "speed boat" on his lake for at least two years, and had rowed a boat since I was old enough to grasp the oar. I remember thinking "following this films instructions will get you killed" at the time. I also remember getting into trouble for voicing this apperently heretical belief.

But yes. I'm sad that my generation was likely the last to get the full-on PET (complete with tape drive) and Slide-Film experince....

then again, certian benefits of being in the film generation....one year the principle snuck in a 70mm film projector and a copy of "The Hobbit" and the entire school took a few hours to watch it:)

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