Change Your Underwear Twice a Week: Lessons from the Golden Age of Classroom Filmstrips - Softcover

Gregory, Danny

3.36

113 ratings by Goodreads

9781579652630: Change Your Underwear Twice a Week: Lessons from the Golden Age of Classroom Filmstrips

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1579652638 ISBN 13: 9781579652630

Publisher: Artisan, 2004

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In the pre-Internet, pre-VCR—oh, go ahead, call them prehistoric—days of baby boomers' grade school, the high art of audiovisual classroom programming was the filmstrip. If you're old enough, you remember the darkened room, the hum of the projector, and the beeep that signaled the teacher to turn to the next frame.

If you weren't busy shooting spitballs, filmstrips might even have taught you something about science, hygiene, the great bounty of American farms and factories. With simple illustrations and quaint photographs that evoke a more innocent era, Change Your Underwear Twice a Week is the first book to collect dozens of these filmstrip treasures together, creating a panorama of four decades of overlooked graphic design, popular culture, and inadvertent humor.

Readers from the Internet generation will get a good chuckle over what appears to be electronic cave art. But you'll also discover one of the great subtexts of postwar American life. From the mid-1940s until the late 1960s, filmstrips were the coming attractions of capitalism and the American way, teaching youngsters how society wanted them to view the world.

Filmstrips celebrated our foundering railroads ("Tommy Takes a Train Trip"), the space program ("The Moon, Our Nearest Neighbor"), and our trusted friend the butcher, the milkman, the mailman, and the cop. They taught us not to sit too close to our new TV sets and why we should change our underwear twice a week (presumably, Commies did this only once a week).

A chronicle of America's filmstrip experience, Change Your Underwear Twice a Week is also a glimpse into the companies and eccentric pioneers who created these graphic gems and how they influenced several generations of American youth.

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Book Description:

With simple illustrations and quaint photographs that evoke a more innocent era—presented in Technicolor or rich black-and-white in a broad range of illustration styles—Change Your Underwear Twice a Week is a chronicle of the classroom filmstrip experience. It will instantly transport baby boomers back to fifth-period social studies, the smell of art paste, the sound of the recess bell. It's the first book to collect dozens of these treasures together, creating a panorama of four decades of inadvertent humor embedded in earnest lessons on how to grow up healthy and strong, the mysteries of outer space, faraway lands, and the "modern" world.

Readers from the Internet generation will get a good chuckle over what appears to be electronic cave art. But they'll also discover the great subtexts of the Cold War world in filmstrips that explained why America was great and our way of life the envy of the world.

From the Publisher:

Funnier than your favorite episode of "Huckleberry Hound," and more satisfying than a Velveeta cheese sandwich, this clever new book by Danny Gregory will zap you back to your elementary school years faster than your mom could bark "stand up straight!" Change Your Underwear Twice a Week transports us back to tender years, when life was simpler and America was innocent.

This is the first book to collect the popular film strips, once widely shown to U.S. school children in the decades following World War II. Designed to make us feel safe, tow the line with authorities, or get excited about the moon and outer space, the lessons are brought back here in vintage Technicolor or black and white.

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