Our Mr. Sun

Dunno what made me think of this guy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER-2dqd1h3I

Dr. Frank C. Baxter. One of my childhood heroes.

22 Comments

Eddie Albert in one of his greatest roles, right up there with Green Acres and The Longest Day.

@Dave H: I just loved it when the day we’d watch one of his films came. Starting in the 4th grade – almost made me go into physics. Wish now that I had.

Cool film, I’d never seen that before. I think I’m too young to have seen things like this in school, the crap I was watching was all made in the late 60s and early 70s. I wonder how many horsepower-hours the average US American uses now…

@IanJ: It’s on Netflix – I just added it to my lineup. I think I first saw the whole thing when I was seven – last time when I was nine or ten. A staple of my childhood.

You have to wonder whether that’s where Jay Ward got Mr. Peabody and Sherman.

I had completely forgotten about those films. All I remember from grade school A/V is the “repurposed” Fantasia earth-origin short and the Sonny Bono drug-conviction movie.

(And for animation geeks: It’s UPA, known best to civilians for Mr. Magoo.)

That is just screaming for the MST3K treatment:

“In 1950, every American withdrew 10,000 horsepower hours from Sun Power Bank, Inc.”

T. Servo: Sun Power branches in the inner city closed, and the bank moved primarily to suburbia, in what became known as “Light Flight.”

@chicago bureau: Bravo–an MST-worthy riff! I have a good friend in St. Paul who apparently has Bill Corbett and his wife over occasionally for cocktails. I told her if she could arrange for him to be there next time I visit, I would try really really hard not to morph into annoying fangirl. This is the only show I’m a complete dork about. The rest of you have your various incarnations of Dr. Who and Star Trek, I have my MST3K.

The only educational film from my elementary school days that affected me deeply was the trauma of our girls-only viewing of a getting ready for puberty film hosted by Aileen Quinn! She was already my hero, as I knew the movie Annie forwards and backwards, but seeing her without red curls, not singing Tomorrow, and instead talking about our soon-to-come periods was deeply, deeply distressing.

who the hell watched the films in school? it was break time for the teacher, and all manner of shenagans for the class. film hour was recess!

nojo, our ‘fearless leader’, just the mention of mr. peabody and sherman warms my cockles.
that show is singularly responible for the smirking obnoxious child i was, and set me on the path i followed to utter cynicism, and appreciation of mockery.

@baked: @flippin eck: How’s this: my film nazi was fifth grade teacher from hell, who also was responsible for teaching us Science. He encouraged us to bring things in (I later learned two things, one of which was he was lazy), so once I brought in a calf heart and used a pencil to show all the ventricles and aorta and shit. Oh, I also brought in a fetus in a jar which is super cool to the son of an OB/GYN who raised his kids with med journals littering the house.

Second thing I learned about Teach? Pro-life Fundie; I’m lucky I survived fifth grade he hated me so much, so film day was heaven.

@nabisco: I totally brought in an unsolicited calf heart too! My dad teaches respiratory therapy and he was done with it for his students, so he thought his fifth-grade daughter should make use of it too! My stunt didn’t earn me the wrath of a pro-life fundie teacher, though.

flippin eck: In case you were curious, do you know what the guys did when that was going on? Nothing. Total goof-off time.

The teacher who did not draw the short, “we have to discuss your changing bodies” straw in our school was a big freak for meditation. And so she forced us to close our eyes and think about the number one for fifteen solid minutes. I took a nap — not so anyone would notice, as everyone’s eyes were closed and stuff. Sweet.

@chicago bureau: Wouldn’t it be better for everyone involved if boys, you know, knew the same things about girls that girls know? At least there’d be fewer “What happens? Ew!” moments down the road.

@mellbell:
One would think so, but I suspect that would happen anyway.

@flippin eck: That was it? Dang, I was hoping the tail would end with her ripping into “Tomorrow! Tomorrow! Pestork ya! Tomorrow! Pestork ya, all night and daaaaaaaaaaaaaay!”

@mellbell: That’s what my dad’s ob/gyn manuals were for!

@Prommie: I have the first season of R&B on DVD.

@mellbell: Back around fifth grade, our school district bought the sex-ed handbooks “Man: A Course of Study”. Since MACOS was a multiyear program, we had to plow through a couple volumes of catch-up early material before getting to the fun stuff.

And when we did — yee-haw! Somewhere amidst the Dirty Volume there was a photo of a naked boy standing in a bathroom with his foot on the toilet seat, junk on parade! So of course we all eagerly flipped ahead to find the equivalent girlie shot…

…and it was a damn illustration.

Not that any one of us couldn’t find the Playboys and Penthouses in Dad’s stash. But still.

@flippin eck: I was a big fan of MST3K, during the Joel days. I taped them. Still have a bunch of VHS tapes.
Poor Joel, though. He hasn’t had great success since he left the show.

@blogenfreude: I’d never heard of this Dr. Baxter, and I was in Grammar school when those Bell Labs films were new.
We got to look at film strips, not those fancy-schmancy movies.
The only film I ever remember seeing in Grammar school was a biography of Louis Pasteur during Health class in 7th grade.

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