10th May 2008
Driver’s Safety Films: None For the Road
Tired of all those 30’s Chevy ads masquerading as safety films? Me too! So today’s offering, made in 1957, is None For the Road: Teen-Age Drinking and Driving. I expected it to be a bit more “mental hygiene” than “driver’s safety”, a teenagers are out of control and drinking OMG WTF film — but the main characters are teenagers only because its intended audience is new drivers. The message applies to drivers of any age, and it’s surprisingly balanced.
A professor of physiology opens the film by explaining it revolves around two seemingly unrelated items: a good-luck charm and an ordinary hypodermic syringe. You may be beginning to see that the professor of physiology is not the best character in this film.
So, through the magic of science, we learn that alcohol blunts your reflexes and makes driving dangerous. This is a subject that required serious scientific study? I knew a lot of people in college who wished their research was “devoted to alcohol and its effect on the human body.” You’d think thousands of years of humans getting drunk and losing their coordination would be pretty compelling, but nooo, this guy has to get rats drunk and see how well they can hold onto thin metal bars. Hey, whatever it takes to get your NSF grant renewed, right?
Humor aside: please don’t drink and drive, ever — for your own safety and everybody else’s.
[...] in point from None For the Road, where the scientist shows you drunk rats to illustrate his point. But things go wrong in the [...]