the good old days

Requested by Buzz, a bit of review of the mental hygiene category of driver’s education.

Unlike other mental hygiene films, driver safety is an extremely important topic that new drivers SHOULD conform to. Most of the educational films still shown to young adults today are highway safety movies. Some of them are pretty dull, concentrating on things like when it’s safe to pass, when to use your horn, and so on. The most famous are the shock-and-gore genre, however. The logic behind them is presumably that if you terrify the viewer and show them careless drivers dying on-screen, that viewer isn’t likely to be a reckless driver.

While the shocking films by Richard Wayman are among the best known, there were certainly movies both before and after his productions; some showed death (such as those made by Sid Davis), some were simple review of the rules.

I expect these films were about as effective as any of the Mind Your Manners or Be A Good Citizen flicks — which is to say, not very. My friends and I were certainly unimpressed when we saw these in the 1990’s, probably because Hollywood had shown us worse stuff for years. I don’t consider speeding, then think to myself, “No, we don’t want to end up with our steering column through our spine, do we?” As a deterrent, they leave something to be desired. As an example of trying to make people fit in to appropriate driving techniques, they’re priceless.