Split into 5 parts due to the university network not allowing uploads over 10mb.
This public information film really makes me laugh, and it shocks me too, in many ways. If there was ever a prime example of these PIF's being used as covert propaganda, this is it.
The far-too-casual-for-such-talk voiceover claims that 10 times the people have been killed in accidents in comparison to the amount of US soldier killed in wars.. a flippant claim if ever I heard one. How can that comparison even be made? an 'accident' is slightly different, in that it is generally unexpected - for example, you don't see an accident coming, but once it has happened it is an accident. Comparing this to a series of wars is odd. I found this to be a strange comparison indeed.. Okay, it wasn't so long after the second world war, so maybe the writers of the film were in such a mindset, but it is still extremely tenuous. Or, it's propaganda. Maybe a little from column A, and a little from column B...
The amount of flippant talk in the voiceover for this film concerned me in particular. Considering the (supposed) point of the film was to make the public aware of potential accidents, one would think that the narration could be more... precise? For example, he talks about the amount of money spent repairing accidents every year, and then quotes some seemingly random figure, before adding 'or something like that.' Who is this guy supposed to be speaking for?
In contemporary American television there is undeniably a lot of spood-feeding from the broadcasters to the audience, and it's not surprising when looking back at old footage such as this- American audiences have clearly grown up being spoonfed information from the television. Particularly, when the narrator gives us a highly scientific explanation as to how accidents happen... the signals in the brain 'get mixed up', and this is called an 'accident', apparently.
Finally, the funniest and most disturbing part of this clip is when the narrator is talking about the (hopefully) fictional family he went to visit. To illustrate a bad family set-up, with accidents waiting to happen, he talks about 'the fat wife'. And when the family have gotten their act together? The wife is thin! I wonder if it's possible to say such things today on America's ultra-conservative television networks?
The point of the PIF is that one should take more care to prevent accidents from occuring, but it goes about it in the wrong way, even for the time in which it was shown, in my opinion.
