America in Space: The First Decade (downloaded from Google Video). [Category: News]

This NASA film from the late 60s documents and celebrates the first decade of NASA accomplishments, including unmanned space exploration, the building and launching of satellites for many purposes, aeronautic breakthroughs, and the research leading up to putting a man on the moon. It does this with very annoying narration that constantly talks about Man and His achievements in space. Other than that, it’s a pretty interesting film, with lots of striking images of space technology. Especially striking is a mildly trippy sequence showing the wide array of jobs involved in manned space flight, consisting of brief clips of all kinds of jobs, with only the sounds of the work on the soundtrack. There’s also an interesting sequence on NASA’s failures, including a bizarre-looking craft that fails in the air and crashes, and a rocket that blows up spectacularly. The film has historical interest in documenting how NASA viewed itself just before Apollo 11. All in all, this is an interesting film that’s fun to watch, though I do wish they would get off of this “Man” kick after awhile.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: **. Weirdness: ***. Historical Interest: ****. Overall Rating: ****.

House Cleaning Blues (film #16 on Cartoon Crazys: Sci-Fi (WinStar Home Entertainment, 1999). Also available for download on Film Chest Vintage Cartoons). [Category: Hollywood]

Betty Boop has those house cleaining blues, so she calls on Grampy to help with his amazing inventions, and the housework is done in no time. Oh, if housework was only this much fun, the world would be a better place. Also, I want an in-dash soda fountain, like Grampy has in his car.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: ***. Weirdness: ****. Historical Interest: ***. Overall Rating: ****.

Allied Drive on in Italy – Planes Smash Foe in Air (downloaded from Google Video). [Category: Military & Propaganda]

This WWII-era newsreel documents Allied progress in Italy, with lots of shoot ‘em up combat footage. Also included are stories on the making of a new transcontinental air speed record by an Air Force pilot, 1300 cadet nurses being sworn in, new army divisions winning medals, crop dusting, and the Allied taking of Hollandia in New Guinea. No surprises here, but there are some striking images of combat and a fair degree of historical interest.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: **. Weirdness: **. Historical Interest: ****. Overall Rating: ***.

Coal Miner (downloaded from Google Video). [Category: Industrial]

This late-70s film, made by Bethlehem Steel, gives a profile of coal mining as a career. It shows a particular coal miner at home, at work, and in the community, letting him speak in his own voice about how he feels about his job, and about being a coal miner. Mostly, it’s very positive feelings about following in his father’s footsteps, making a good living and providing for his family. Later in the film, his fellow miners also talk about their experiences with mining, and again, it’s mostly very positive. Unions are not mentioned, risks are downplayed, and miners are shown living comfortably with their families in nice houses, implying good wages. Of course, this is what you’d expect by a film made by the Company. Still, the miners speak in their own words, and you get a feeling of sincerity from them, which makes the film at least somewhat believable and very interesting to watch. Most surprising is a scene of the miners cleaning up after work in a gang shower and engaging in very mild horseplay. The whole film seems pretty sanitized, yet enough sincerity comes through to make it an interesting portrayal of the life of coal miners during the late 70s.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: **. Weirdness: ***. Historical Interest: ****. Overall Rating: ****.

Dinner Party (in the Ephemeral section of Open Video Project. Also, film #430 on Prelinger Archive). [Category: Educational]

Stiff, stilted manners film from the 40s featuring teens having a dull, lifeless dinner party, and the narrator reading their thoughts, most of which consist of worries that they are not doing everything absolutely 100% correct. The constant implication is that any manners gaffes, no matter how small, have the potential to totally ruin such a party, even though the narrator takes pains to deny this. Other implied contradictions include the narrator repeatedly asserting that the rules of etiquette have logical reasons behind them while never even once giving such a logical reason and further implying that even logical behaviors are forbidden if they’re not “correct”, and the assertion that being perfect in one’s manners increases enjoyment for everyone despite the fact that the both the hosts and the guests of the party are constantly worrying about whether they are doing things right or not. Simmel-Messervey seemed to have a talent for producing “manners” films that exposed the dark side of 40s and 50s middle-class conformity. Their masterpiece in this is A Date with Your Family. This film shows that even outside of the family, the straightjacket of conformity was tightly bound.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: ****. Weirdness: ****. Historical Interest: ****. Overall Rating: ****.

La Bamba (downloaded from Bedazzled). [Category: Hollywood]

No, this is not Richie Valens, but a Mexican Scopitone that does the song in a more traditional fashion, with a female singer and two mariachi guitarists. No real surprises here, but this is lively and fun.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: ***. Weirdness: ***. Historical Interest: ***. 0verall Rating: ***.

And Then It Happened (downloaded from Google Video. Also available on You Tube). [Category: Educational]

We’ve come a long way from the 50s, kids. By the 70s, educational filmmakers had abandoned the “we just love being safe and following the rules” approach to safety films in favor of the scare approach. So this school bus safety film for junior high kids was based on the driver’s ed scare model, though perhaps not quite as gory. It tells the stories of two different bus accident caused by kids acting up on the bus. The kids are very realistic and extremely obnoxious, requiring the drivers to stop every few minutes to put out cigarettes, remove dogs, stop fights, and, in one case, to summon police to take a sick kid who had been popping pills to the hospital. You’re surprised that enough driving takes place to cause an accident, but the accidents eventually happen when the kids’ behavior becomes even worse. These dramatizations are portrayed with little narration, and the inevitable accidents are shown in lurid slow-motion. I suppose, if anything, this film prepared its junior high audience for the gory scare films they would later see in driver’s ed class in high school. This also qualifies as a scare film for anybody who was in junior high during the 70s, as it’s bound to bring back unpleasant traumatic flashbacks. And like watching most accidents, it’s extremely unpleasant, but you can’t tear yourself away.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: ***. Weirdness: ****. Historical Interest: *****. Overall Rating: $$$$.

Champs de Mars (film #59 on Edison Film Archive. Also, film #4 on The Mechanized Eye disc of Unseen Cinema DVD Boxed Set (Image Entertainment, 2005)). [Category: Early Film & TV]

A whole lot of nicely-dressed turn-of-the-century people walk down a Paris street, and Edison’s camera captures them in a panoramic sweep. This is a great snapshot of a particular place at a particular time. A 1900 Edison film.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: *. Weirdness: **. Historical Interest: ****. Overall Rating: ***.

Blood Bath Trailer (extra on Monster-a-Go-Go/Psyched by the 4-D Witch DVD (Something Weird, 2002)). [Category: Commercial]

Campy, lurid trailer for the 60s AIP horror flick Blood Bath, featuring a deranged artist/serial killer. What does it say about our culture that we seem to equate the artistic temperament with homicidal mania? Or maybe it’s just an AIP thing. At any rate, this trailer is mildly campy, but not very surprising.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: ***. Weirdness: ***. Historical Interest: ****. Overall Rating: ***.

Factory on Film (track #4 on Who Built America? CD-ROM (Voyager, 1993). [Category: Early Film & TV]

This excerpt from one of the first industrial films shows us the Westinghouse Air Brake & Electric Motor Company's huge Pennsylvania plant. Huge motor parts predominate as well as turn-of-the-century female factory workers. An interesting brief glimpse into the Industrial Revolution. A 1904 Billy Bitzer film.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: *. Weirdness: **. Historical Interest: ****. Overall Rating: ****.

Check out my Ephemeral Films lens on Squidoo!

The Clash on Rock Revolution (film #58 in the Video section of Bedazzled). [Category: Sleaze & Outsider]

The Clash rock out “I’m So Bored with the USA” and “London’s Burning” in this televised concert footage. You can barely hear them sing over the screams of the crowd, but they project so much energy it doesn’t matter. A great punk relic.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: **. Weirdness: ***. Historical Interest: ****. Overall Rating: ****.

National Drinking Game PSA (film #31 on AV Geeks). [Category: Public Service]

Middle-aged people at a wild, drunken party are seriously bummed out by the National Drinking Game, which is actually an assessment test for alcoholism. From the looks on their faces, I’d say most of these partygoers are alcoholics, which is no surprise, frankly. Would that it be so easy to break through denial in real life.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: ***. Weirdness: ***. Historical Interest: ****. Overall Rating: ****.

Holiday Greetings, 1941 (recorded off of Turner Classic Movies). [Category: Military & Propaganda]

Lewis Stone extends heartfelt holiday greetings to the boys over there. Since this is a theatrical short designed to be shown over here, it's hard to know whether or not they got the message.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: **. Weirdness: **. Historical Interest: ***. Overall Rating: **.

Antipode Polychromasia (film #3 on Open Source Movies). [Category: Outtakes & Obscurities]

This experimental film is similar to Anomalies of the Unconscious, involving exposed film that has been hand-colored and altered to create abstract images. Again, this has beautiful abstract imagery and a haunting soundtrack which seems to match the imagery perfectly. Another mesmerizing experimental film.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: *. Weirdness: ****. Historical Interest: ***. Overall Rating: ****.

Fight Rages on Wallace Appointment (film #185 on Universal Newsreels). [Category: News]

40s newsreel reporting opposition in Congress to the appointment of Henry Wallace as head of the Commerce Department. This is typical political wrangling and speechifying. Also included are stories on the need for more WACs to assist nurses in army hospitals, military and diplomatic bigwigs visiting various places, a fire at a navy pier, a father of triplets inventing a device that gives them their bottles simultaneously, and the invention of a new buzz bomb. The WAC story has some interesting footage of nurses which may have been taken from another film, and the baby-feeder story is pretty silly. Other than that, this is a very ordinary 40s newsreel.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: **. Weirdness: **. Historical Interest: ****. Overall Rating: ***.

Blast Berlin by Daylight (film #100 on Universal Newsreels). [Category: Military & Propaganda]

This wartime newsreel documents the first Allied air raids over Berlin. Some great footage of pilots bantering in front of their decorated planes is shown. Also include are stories about the humane treatment of German prisoners of war in the US, Brazilian fishermen retrieving rubber from a sunken German ship, Mrs. Roosevelt and Mrs. Douglas MacArthur making goodwill trips, a successful air raid on Saipan, and the St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York. This is a great wartime newsreel that gives you a good snapshot of different happenings during the war years. Unlike most of the WWII-era newsreels on the Universal Newsreels site, this is very well preserved.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: **. Weirdness: ***. Historical Interest: ****. Overall Rating: ****.

The Hoose-Gow (film #3 on Monsters We've Known and Loved (Creepy Classics)). [Category: Hollywood]

This early silent Laurel & Hardy short features the pair getting sent up the river to the big house. We feel sorry for them, but we should feel sorry for the prison––after all, there's no bad situation L & H can't make lots worse, and they do in their inevitable slapstick fashion. It all ends with a big rice-glop fight (it's a long story). What this has to do with monsters, I don't know, but it's lots of fun.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: ****. Weirdness: ***. Historical Interest: ****. Overall Rating: ****.

Easy Does It! (film #14 on Cultoons, Vol. 1: Ads and Oddities DVD (Thunderbeam Animation, 2004)). [Category: Industrial]

Joe loves Ann. Ann loves Joe. Joe and Ann want to get married. Problem: Ann’s father’s grocery store is failing, and the mortgage holder, evil Mr. Squeeze, is threatening to foreclose on it unless Ann agrees to marry him. Joe, who works as a stockboy in the store, believes that all is lost until Easy, the Stokely-Van Camp sprite, visits him and shows him how he can increase the store’s profits by stocking Stokely-Van Camp products instead of the UK (Unknown) Brand of canned goods the store had been trying to sell. This animated film for grocery store owners is a true delight. It has just about everything I like to see in an ephemeral film: a supernatural sprite character who comes to help out the main character, singing and dancing food items, housewifey footage, and lots of scenes of 40s grocery stores and grocery products in glorious, garish color. Highlights include the UK canned goods coming to life to try to lure a customer into buying them (they are unsuccessful), Easy taking Joe to visit the gods of rain and sun, the Stokely Man showing Joe a non-animated ephemeral-film-within-an-ephemeral-film, and a delightful scene of singing and dancing tomatoes being canned on a production line. The film has been beautifully restored so that you can enjoy its garish colors in all their glory––the scene of a huge bin of redder-than-red ketchup bottles will practically blow the color rods in your eyes. A classic of ephemera that gets an easy 5 stars.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: *****. Weirdness: *****. Historical Interest: *****. Overall Rating: *****.

A Cowboy Needs a Horse (film #6 on Disc #2 of Disney Rarities DVD (Disney, 2005)). [Category: Hollywood]

In this 50s cartoon, a small boy has a dream about being a cowboy and fighting various bad guys. This is a charming toon made in the 50s modern style, with no dialogue, just the title song on the soundtrack. I particularly like the beginning sequence, where a giant pencil draws all the things the boy needs to be a real cowboy (horse, rope, spurs, etc.), as well as the ending, where the items are all erased in turn. A great example of 50s modern style animation.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: **. Weirdness: ***. Historical Interest: ****. Overall Rating: ****.