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Pant-Wettingly Scary Public Information Films

They are trying to re enact the Edison kite experiment.
:omr:
 
The emphasis on the dangers of pylons changed from kites to carbon-fibre fishing poles a few years later. The problem was arcing from the wires to the tip of the poles if casting within a certain radius of a pylon. Anyone heard of drone-related accidents and pylons ?
 
This is not a public safety film of the past but it is a childhood memory from the era of scary public safety/play safely films (for me 1970s and early 1980s)

I have memories of an episode of Grange Hill where a child drowned in the swimming pool trying to retrieve a girl's bracelet. I didn't see the character's death coming at all...You saw a teacher leave the area prior to the incident, then the incident itself. Then the teacher returned, saw the boy in the water, jumped in to rescue the boy and tried to resusitate him without success....

According to the blog article I've linked to, they had to change their plans when creating that season because the actor whose character was to drown in the original scripts didn't like the idea and decided to leave before filming started.

It meant they brought in a new character to Grange Hill school that season and killed him off quite quickly. That must have been why I found it such a surprise/shock.​

https://grangehillgold.wordpress.com/features/drowning-the-truth/
 
Not scary, except for the risk of dying of embarrassment:

In 2007, I was told by my employer that I would be traveling to a few risky countries, health-wise; that I needed to get additional vaccinations; and that I should get the vaccinations at the Norfolk Naval Station base hospital. This hospital also served former military members, which is where the hilarity ensued.

The active military and the retired military (and me, a puny female civilian) had separate waiting areas. Each waiting area had a big screen monitor hanging from the ceiling, and the monitors each played very different videos or TV. During my wait, the programs had been accidentally switched. So the active military (young men that day) got an American soap opera and the elderly retired military men and I got a 45 minute video on what different STDs looked like at different stages of the infection. This was filmed actual infections, and not illustrations. After 45 minutes, the loop started again…
 
Bad Bungle said:
The emphasis on the dangers of pylons changed from kites to carbon-fibre fishing poles a few years later. The problem was arcing from the wires to the tip of the poles if casting within a certain radius of a pylon. Anyone heard of drone-related accidents and pylons ?
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I do window cleaning with a carbon fibre pole that's extendable to 35ft. The base section that I hold is insulated. I may be wrong but I think it's now a legal requirement. In the past there were deaths from window cleaning poles touching live wires overhead.
 
FB_IMG_1678481872251.jpg
 
Yithian said:
Top work with the Tangerine Dream keyboard sound of existential dread.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1615439313155547152
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Somehow, that one made a particularly big impression on me. Hearing of kids my own age dying in water accidents probably helped the horror along.

Gave me a fear of allowing small children around garden ponds. When my in-laws had one built, very deep and steep-sided, I had a young family with the ex. I angrily refused to allow the kids to visit without my personal supervision because the ex wouldn't have kept an eye on them.

In-laws had to shell out to build a wall and gate around the pond and I wasn't popular. :chuckle:

Didn't bother me. I was right. Children drown in garden ponds. Such an accident sadly happened in our home town not long afterwards.
I was all see told you see told you see see told you told you see told you.
 
Not exactly a public information film- As a young civillian working for the Royal Air Force I was "Required to Attend" an awareness session on drugs being given by the RAF police. This involved some fairly graphic descriptions the physical perils of drug taking- pictures of infected wounds, collapsed veins, septic feet where there had been injections between toes and a lab specimen which turned out to be a penis that had to be amputated do to sepsis from repeated drug injections into the vein. At this point several people had to leave the room and the first
faint occurred.

It got worse, we then had a video of a raid on a property where drug use was suspected, among the debris they found the body of a young man who had OD- he had been stashed under the sofa so as not to spoil the party.

We were then told that the "pickled penis" was found on one of these raids in a jar under the kitchen sink where it was kept by it owner and bought out at parties.

I can honestly say this had a big impact on me, and presumably on all those who had to "pop out for air" or be helped out by mates.

With hindsight I some of this was creative re-enactment, but that murky specimen jar still haunts me.
 
Eyespy said:
It got worse, we then had a video of a raid on a property where drug use was suspected, among the debris they found the body of a young man who had OD- he had been stashed under the sofa so as not to spoil the party.
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Something similat happened in Dublin last year.
 
I've seen a few scary,weird PSAs and "educational movies" back in the day, to be sure. The earliest one I can remember was a short doc about rabies with the rather unimaginative title Rabies, which a substitute teacher ran for us one day in the second grade and which was in my bad dreams for months afterward.

The 1970s, which was when i attended high school, was the Golden Age of 16-mm drug scare movies aimed at teenagers. At least once a year we'd get to see an informative film in science class or PE or civics, called smething like Trip To Nowhere, or The Chemical Grave, or Narcotics-The Pit Of Doom, or something of that nature which featured little vignettes like a guy allegedly tripping on acid at the zoo who felt like he was a superhero who could kick a lion's ass, and so he jumped into the lion enclosure, slapped the occupant in the jibs, and then the screen went blank with ominous music, so I doubt he made it out of that cage. There was also The Perfect Drug, which postulated that if science came up with The Best Drug Ever and it had no bad side effects....well, then we'd all be doing too much of this drug all the damn time, and terrible shit would happen to everybody as a result, and civilization would speedily grind down to a euphoric halt. Because we're just all bad like that and would most assuredly choose the quondam bad pleasant thing over the soi disant good unpleasant one. Driver's Ed at the same school prominently featured the classic, Grand Guignolesque motor morality tales cum snuff movies like Red Asphalt, Signal 39, and Wheels Of Tragedy.

Lots of anti-drugs TV spots showed throughout my youth (my main tv watching age), all designed to scare us kids away from the dope. Most of them have blurred together into a melange of frightening images and menacing voice-overs.

The Montana Meth Project and similar recent campaigns against speed usage, some of those get pretty nightmarish. Like the one where two young lads take their first hits off a meth pipe and zombie drug addicts appear out of nowhere and laugh evilly at them, or the one that takes place in a laundromat.

The anti-drug spot I recall most vividly is an out-there little mini-horror-flick of an anti-methamphetamine PSA which nobody else but me ever seems to have seen, where passersby turn into white eyed zombies and tell the strung-out POV character "They're gonna kill you" and suchlike encouraging messages, until he pulls out a pistol and....WHERE METH GOES, VIOLENCE FOLLOWS.

Lastly there are some Canadian work-safety PSAs I've seen online which just seem calculated to wake up grown-ass adults with shrieking nightmares, like the one where the young restaurant cook describes her horrific fatal accident she's just about to have with a greasy kitchen floor and a great big pot of boiling soup...and a second later, she has that fatal accident with the greasy kitchen floor and the great big pot of boiling soup, right in front of us, and it's very graphic and horrible.

The powers that be seem really fond of the idea that they can scare us all straight, don't they.
 
I suppose this mobile phone emergency test Sunday 23rd as pointed out by

Mythopoeika :twothumbs:​

is the same sort of thing, phone makes loud buzz "kiss your ass goodbye".
 
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RaM said:
I suppose this mobile phone emergency test next Sunday is the same sort of thing,
phone makes loud buzz "kiss your ass goodbye".
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Sunday 23rd, not next Sunday.
 
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Mythopoeika said:
I don't recall ever hearing of any kids who'd done anything that daft.
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I've never seen this version of the 'don't climb pylons kids!' public information film but I could swear I remember an earlier version of this?. My memory instead has a younger kid dying doing the same thing trying to retrieve an orange frisbee. All the kids were younger in the version I remember, they all had 70's haircuts instead of the 80's ones in Yithian's video link and there were more pylons in my memory. The kid in my remembered version also broke into a chicken wire fenced off compound to be able to reach the pylon.
 
I too remember a frisbee film, also some shocking films about fireworks, having feet cut off trying to retrieve football boots on a railway track, and being poisoned when drinking mysterious liquids in bottles that some rather strange adults had left in the wrong bottles/within reach....

They basically scared children in the 70s with these horrifying/nightmare inducing films.
 
Earthly oddity said:
I too remember a frisbee film, also some shocking films about fireworks, having feet cut off trying to retrieve football boots on a railway track, and being poisoned when drinking mysterious liquids in bottles that some rather strange adults had left in the wrong bottles/within reach....

They basically scared children in the 70s with these horrifying/nightmare inducing films.
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Found it! .. it wasn't a chicken wire fence then ..


I remember this one as well :) .. I knew I'd seen that blue kite in the pylon remake before ..

 
Swifty said:
They should play Dancing With Tears In My Eyes by Ultravox instead because this test transmission is blatantly a nuclear warning one.
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Should we start making ineffective shelters or just have a "bonk" or do whatever floats our boats when the warning tone sounds....

Is the tone really a test for use in such an emergency? Has the likelihood of such an emergency got more likely than we are aware? :omg:
 
Earthly oddity said:
Should we start making ineffective shelters or just have a "bonk" or do whatever floats our boats when the warning tone sounds....

Is the tone really a test for use in such an emergency? Has the likelihood of such an emergency got more likely than we are aware? :omg:
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I'll be reaching for the bottle of expensive wine.
I have no bunker to hide in.
 
They are warning that you could be fined if you turn off the emergency message
wile driving on Sunday 23rd, which makes me wonder how many crashes will
happen during the test.
:omr:
 
RaM said:
They are warning that you could be fined if you turn off the emergency message
wile driving on Sunday 23rd, which makes me wonder how many crashes will
happen during the test.
:omr:
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They? Who? Where?
 
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