Prelinger Ephemera 101

In 1983 Rick Prelinger began collecting what nobody else wanted: the sponsored, educational and industrial films that companies, schools and government agencies had commissioned by the tens of thousands and then thrown away. By the time the Library of Congress acquired the collection in 2002, the Prelinger Archives held some 60,000 reels, and more than 10,000 of them have since been scanned and put online at the Internet Archive. This Reel is the guided tour.

Start with A Date with Your Family (1950), ten minutes of dinner-table etiquette that reads today like science fiction, then Are You Popular? (1947) and Shy Guy (1947), Coronet Instructional Films made for high-school social-guidance classes. Dating: Do's and Don'ts (1949) walks a boy called Woody through his first date with the help of an animated "Wise Owl". Watch how each film ends in the same place: a well-behaved teenager, a tidy suburban home, a nation at ease.

The sponsors reveal themselves in the next group. Design for Dreaming (1956), a musical sales fantasy for General Motors' Motorama, sends a woman in a tulle gown floating through a kitchen of the future. The Relaxed Wife (1957) is a pharmaceutical pitch for a tranquilliser disguised as a rhyming lifestyle short. In the Suburbs (1957) was made by Redbook magazine to prove to advertisers that young families were worth reaching. Freedom Highway (1956), Master Hands (1936) and the Middleton Family at the New York World's Fair (1939) were paid for by Greyhound, Chevrolet and Westinghouse respectively; Master Hands and the Middleton Family are now on the National Film Registry.

Then the dark side of the genre: Boys Beware (1961) and Perversion for Profit (1964) show how the same techniques were used to spread fear, while Brotherhood of Man (1946), an animated film by the UPA studio for the United Auto Workers, used them to argue against racism. The Reel closes with two films that explain the machinery of the century, How a Watch Works (1949) and The Story of Television (1956), and with Duck and Cover (1951), the civil-defence cartoon that taught a generation to hide under its desk.

Prelinger has always argued that these films are as revealing as any feature: they show what institutions wanted people to believe, and what people were assumed to want. Almost all were published without a copyright notice or never renewed, which is why they can be watched, cut up and reused today.