Bizarre Educational Videos They Actually Showed In School

Depending on which decade you grew up in, you might remember the sheer exhilaration that came when someone rolled an unwieldy TV cart into the classroom at the beginning of the day. On those magical days when your teacher was nursing a particularly large cup of coffee and enforcing a stringent "inside voices" policy, it meant that the day's lessons were being abandoned in favor of a more hangover-friendly screening of The Fox and the Hound. The rest of the time, it just meant educational videos.

Presumably built around the premise that kids will watch anything you put on a screen, educational videos have been buzzing in one side of students' heads and out the other for decades. But every once in a while, this underwhelming medium produces something so odd, so unbelievable, that it clicks back into our heads during our adult lives and makes us think to ourselves "wait, what? Somebody showed me that? On purpose? To teach me ... something?" Here are a few of the more scrumptious oddities.

Just ask any '90s kid: Drugs are bad. The message was hammered into their heads so hard and so often that none of them ever experimented with substances of any kind and now, a few decades later, the drug crisis is over and Americans don't really know what to worry about anymore.

And it's a good thing, too: According to this cautionary film from 1969, LSD was a real brain-breaker. Our protagonist, you see, was at this party, and she was, in her own words, "pretty jacked up on marijuana" when somebody offered her some acid, and she was curious. What follows is the setup to just about every "dork gets stoned" joke from every college comedy from the last 40 years: The narrator dropped acid, didn't feel anything, kept not feeling anything, then decided to go get a hot dog.

You can probably guess what happened next, but in case you can't, the hot dog turned into a troll doll and started screaming at her when she tried to eat it. Our hero threw the hot dog on the ground, ran away screaming, and the end. That's the lesson. Take drugs and your food will be kind of scary for a little while.

You know how it is. Your hubby is on his way home from the cigarette factory or the business store and you, a dutiful 1950s Stepford wife, awaken from sleep mode because previous records indicate that he'll be wanting a delicious sandwich. There's only one problem: You don't know how to sandwich!

Luckily for you, there's "Let's Make A Sandwich," the classic instructional video brought to you by the American Gas Association, who probably didn't see what was funny about that. Open on two boys consuming fast food with the panicked fervor of a pair of feral children, we're informed by the narrator that "there are sandwiches and sandwiches." With that cleared up, we move on to Sally and her mother, a pair of red-blooded American women preparing for company by making "tuna rarebit," a cheese, milk, and tuna delicacy that the audience gets to watch them make. For a brief moment, it looks like Sally or her mother might be allowed to talk, but no. The fatherly narration continues throughout.

Also, did you know that a salad and potato chips are good additions to a meal? Potato chips might seem complicated, but don't worry. The narrator puts them into context for you. And for clarity's sake, he also makes sure to point out one more time, "there are sandwiches and sandwiches." Yes, that line, with that emphasis, comes up twice. This is what learning looks like.

It's a question that plagued Spanish teachers across the globe for centuries: How do you get kids to remember that "me gusta" means that you like something? It is, after all, the most difficult aspect of the language to master, if you don't count verb conjugation or retaining the proper gender for every noun on the planet or really pretty much most of the other parts of learning Spanish.

Then along came the "Me Gusta" video to change the game forever. Just take a moment to consider all the things that you gusta. They're all here. Why? Because this frantic, amphetamine-fueled exploration of all the things that people gusta is roughly at the same level as a home video project made by the troublingly noisy kid in class. From silent film clips to a suspiciously enthusiastic plug for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, kids were treated to over ten straight minutes of examples of all things worthy of a good gusta.

Once kids were well versed on the ins and outs of how atomic bombs worked, it was important to fill them in on the best ways to explode if they were ever in the area when one went off. Enter 1951's Duck and Cover, a mixed media short film about nuclear war which, missing the opportunity that was staring it right in the face, did not feature one single duck.

Chances are that you've seen "Duck and Cover" at some point. It's sort of the poster child for Cold War-era preparedness videos, and Bert the Difficult To Blow Up Turtle is probably tucked away in your subconscious somewhere. What you might not remember are some of the finer details, like how Bert is constantly under siege by a suicide monkey dangling a stick of dynamite from a piece of string, or how they describe the way an atom bomb will char your flesh as being "worse than a terrible sunburn." Most importantly, if you're at school when nuclear war breaks out, get under your desk with your hands over your neck. It's very important that when you die horribly, you do it under your desk with your hands over your neck.

Have you been beating your head against the wall trying to find the perfect onscreen marriage of musical drag performance, questionable green screens, and mass crab death by anoxia? Well, fret no longer. Billy B. Brennan has the scratch for your itch in the form of the Crab Jubilee song.

For more than 40 years, Bill Brennan has been creating video and music resources teaching kids about science and nature. He's put out albums, VHS tapes, and a web series, and as charming and eclectic as it all is, none of it holds a candle to the Crab Jubilee song.

In this masterpiece, Billy B. plays Anoxia May, a Southern belle with a song to sing about the Alabama Gulf Coast's crab jubilee, a sporadic occurrence in which shellfish swarm to the land. Anoxia loves the crab jubilee, but you know who doesn't? Mister Crab, a crustacean involved in the jubilee, helpfully played by Billy B. as well. Joining in on the song, he explains how what you're actually witnessing when this happens is nightmarish mass death: The water has become too starved of oxygen to maintain life, so the crabs head for the hills, the life slowly leaving their poor hardened bodies. Sing along, kiddies!

If the first roadblock you encounter when planning a party is the loud, persistent ringing of the words "but I don't know how to do party!" repeating in your head again and again and again like the bells of a socially stunted clocktower, you're in luck.

"What Makes A Good Party?" was produced by Coronet Instructional Media, an educational video production company founded by, no kidding, a guy named David Smart. Through Coronet, Smart produced dozens of educational films with titles like "Are You Popular?" and "Why We Respect The Law." But none of these cinematic masterpieces reached the same heights as "What Makes A Good Party?" In it, three young women in pajamas explore the nuances of the social gathering they have in mind. There's just so much to do. "We have to feed the men!" one exclaims. Some thought goes into what they'll serve. They land on sandwiches, no doubt confident after learning about tuna rarebits in that earlier video. The trio nearly stumbles when they realize they don't know how they'll keep everyone entertained, but the day is saved when they remember they can go to the library and check out plenty of magazines and books, thereby learning "really good games."

Look, the real star of the picture is the stuffed panda bear and his terrified eyes.