Category Archives: parody

This Weekend’s Featured Movie

The Fun of Being Thoughtful.

No kidding, that’s the name of this “educational” film that is part of the Internet Archives (a fun site to visit for ephemeral films) Ernest M. Ligon, Ph.D, author of The Psychology of Christian Personality (published 1938) was the educational collaborator. This short film from 1950 is about the Proctors, a family that seems to be on Prozac, or maybe that’s Xanax. Scary, this one is.

It demonstrates how the perfect family behaves, thoughtfully (oh, gag me now). They have no real emotional stress. Problems are resolved with a double date (more like cheating on the girlfriend and supported by the sister) and talking to dad and mom about sensitive issues. They’ve got to be kidding. This genre of films were shown right through the early 70s in high schools, until someone got smart and realized, Zombies!

I try to be thoughtful, but not as dramatically moody as Eddie, when I make cold calls to people I hardly know (sorry to all the art buyers). Behavior like this today would be considered psychopathic and the Proctor family may go berserk at any moment with their repressed anger.

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A replacement for high cost of original, creative thinking

Fifty years ago,  Calvin Communications, a leading corporate industrial film producer of the 40s and 50s, created this short film as a spoof of their own corporate work. Using their regular actors, Calvin (whose clients included DuPont, Goodyear, General Mills and Westinghouse), would regularly produce parodies that were shown at company get togethers.

This film from the Prelinger Archives opens with a commentary that says, it is a groundbreaking replacement for the high cost of original, creative thinking. Some things never change.

(References here were from Wikipedia – yeah,yeah, I know, not the best references! – and Steve Hoffman Music Forums)

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