Sprocket Films Offers a Campy Look Into Mid-Century Social Panic

January 10, 2022, Charles Bramesco

These hilarious short films are perfect to throw on in the background

With the search functions on streaming platforms being what they are, navigating their massive banks of video content can sometimes feel like machete-whacking your way through a thicket of overgrown jungle. Beneath the canopy of original productions and major acquisitions trumpeted on front page marquees, there’s a layer of under-the-radar gems that writers do their best to promote with numerous informative listicles. But there’s even another layer below that, where weird little specimens skitter about on the streaming equivalent of the forest floor. Detritus outside the realm of moviedom—background filler putting your given Yule Log to shame, decades-old TV specials long since forgotten, amateurish shorts produced for no more than eleven dollars—thrives here. On Amazon Prime, the finest specimens have been collected under the banner of Sprocket Flicks.

There’s a curious dearth of information on the company, credited by Amazon as director on dozens of vintage filmstrip compilations from “Driver’s Education Scare Films” to “Teenager Social Guidance Films” to “Food Commercials.” (“Marriage Counseling Films” is free; the rest are an excellent use of one dollar.) Their official web site looks very fake, and an enterprising sleuth on Reddit has suggested that these are just lazily repackaged uploads of identical collections of public domain footage distributed on disc by Something Weird Video. Whatever the case may be, these titles are the ultimate in low-impact comfort viewing.

The scratchy found-object look of these 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s artifacts can set a perfect background ambience for a party or smaller get-together, and they’re ready fodder for a night of boozy razzing with friends. There’s a limitless supply of unintended hilarity in these over-the-top snatches of mid-century panic, in which certain death lies around every corner for foolhardy children who fail to heed the warnings of the stentorian narrators. The gravity of their intended impact clashes with their total lack of credibility, the acting and writing both far too wooden to be taken seriously by the moldable young minds meant to be watching it. “It’s corny!” chuckles one teenybopper in the car-safety short “Last Date” as a radio DJ announces, “Teenicide is the the fine art of killing yourself—and maybe someone else—before you reach the age of 20. You do it with an automobile. It’s easy, really!”

The driver’s ed clips mash this irony button hardest, with their gruesome wrecks of twisted metal and distended carnage more intense than half of today’s horror releases. It’s hard to say whether the chipper presentation takes the edge off the heaving tragedy of all the accidents, or renders them even more disturbing. In “The Bottle and the Throttle,” a drunk driver blows into a primitive breathalyzer that looks like an inflated condom while an upbeat voiceover informs us that “you’ll get a Superman complex behind the wheel at the very time when your driving skill and mental outlook have been seriously damaged!” The whiplash of the tonal herky-jerkiness is as intense as any onscreen, caught between the morbid admonition that a car is a screaming deathtrap waiting to happen and the impetus to keep the vibe in the classroom light.

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