Educational Sound Filmstrips

Remember the 70's and 80's when elementary schools used those now-antiquated grey, sound filmstrip projectors? Every time the tape would make some kind of tone in between the audio commentary you had to manually advance to the next frame via that little black knob?

Ahhhh, the good ole' days!

I remember one that I think was titled "The Civil War - A Nation Divided" that included info on Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin.

Has any company officially archived these to DVD?

I see "The Mouse On The Mayflower" is available on vhs, but not dvd.

 

Yep....I was one of the geeks who used to actually WANT to run the things. Kinda fitting that I still deal with audio and video (and film) stuff to this day.

I remember an automated rig that my school had, along with the older manual projectors. The automated rig has a built in cassette deck, and the newer tapes had the same program on side B of the cassette, with the exception of the tones now being ultra-high freqencies that only the projector would hear, and in turn advance the filmstrip itself.

Even back then, when the thing was less than ten years old, it didn't work worth a sh**. It would always double-advance the film, and all chaos would erupt!

I'm only 32 years old, and I feel VERY old when talking about this stuff.

Don't get me started on the vintage PILE of Wollensak R-2-R units that were in my high school closet gathering dust!

 

Not to mention the SIZE of those cassettes,which were HUGE!! They looked almost like the RCA Cassettes of the '50's that held 1/4 " tape- 4 track 'living stereo' tapes. Michael Boyce

 

No...these were regular compact cassettes.

 

I could swear we had some older ones in school with a crappy little record player built in...

 

When I was maybe 10 my dad took me one day to the high school he taught at (I forget why) and at one point introduced me to the school's AV tech. I expressed some kind of interest and he showed me his office which was this big room packed to the rafters with cool-looking gear. To borrow a phrase from John Lennon, I thought "now that's a good job."

 

There's an entire book about filmstrips.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3893161

My favorite filmstrip was a PSA called Patch The Pony.

http://www.retroist.com/2009/11/18/patch-the-pony-says-“nay-nay”-and-strangers-“stay-stay-away”/

Nay, Nay! From strangers stay away!

 

I would love to see these on DVD. Memories.

Remember the ones that didn't have a "tone" when you were supposed to switch the slide? Like you were just supposed to know when to switch them.

 

No tone? Man, that must've kept the projector operator on his toes.

 

In middle school we had these projectors in the library that used cartridges that housed something like 8mm film. It had its own build in screen and they may have run about 5 or 10 min in length. You could also run them in reverse. I think the soundtrack was on a separate cassette tape. The topics were the usual educational stuff. My favorite was the one about volcanoes. I would love to see some of those again.