A Bit of Back to School Nostalgia
Categories: Staff Picks , Nonfiction
It's back to school time for all but a few lucky kids. What a great time for us "old people" to look back and remember our own school days. For instance, remember filmstrips? Change Your Underwear Twice a Week brought it all back to me. Suddenly I recalled the filmstrips in their little plastic tubes, always wound backwards and requiring a quick rewind while the class waited. Then there were the old filmstrip projectors, made out of heavy metal and sitting on someone's tiny desk like a World War II battleship. I spent more than a little time sitting in a classroom with the shades drawn while the teacher, (or some very lucky teacher's pet) waited for the "ding" that would signal them to turn the little dial and advance one frame. My school days coincided with the tail end of the filmstrip era, and yet I swear we still had some of the "classics" shown in Change your Underwear Twice a Week. Covering several of the best filmstrip topics, like Hygiene, Careers and How to Stand in Line, this book combines frames from classic filmstrips with snippets of filmstrip history and some details of the relationship of the filmstrips to current events at the time they were made.
However, there is one aspect of the book's filmstrip history that doesn't agree with my version of events. In its section called "Whatever happened to the filmstrip" it asserts that filmstrips fell out of favor in American schools in the 60s and 70s. I know better; they were alive and well and still being shown in my school in the early to mid-1980s, although considering the appearance of most of the ones we watched, perhaps no new ones had been produced since the 70s! Perhaps this tells a bit about my school's budget, or perhaps it just proves that famous quote about Cincinnati (the one usually attributed to Mark Twain).
By the way, if you've checked out the book and still can't get enough, search Youtube for "filmstrip" and check out the collection of real and satire filmstrips!
