The film won a National Safety Council Award and inspired future films to follow its gory path to road safety.
#Drive ed for kids code#
“Signal 30” is the radio code used by the Ohio State Highway Patrol for a fatal traffic accident. It was produced by Richard Wayman and narrated by Wayne Byers. The film incorporated footage of corpses from actual accidents and was shown to high school students across the country during the 1960s.
#Drive ed for kids drivers#
In 1959, driver safety videos took a gruesome turn when the Highway Safety Films of Mansfield produced Signal 30, the first of a long line of graphic educational films designed to scare young drivers into exercising caution. In the end, it emphasizes how all three men, including the two who survived, were impacted by the crash. Like And Then There Were Four, the audience knows that one man will die, but not which one. Appointment With Disaster tells the story of three drivers who are in a hurry and make careless mistakes as a result. This was at least their second film of this type with the first being You’re Driving 90 Horses, which came out in 1949. In 1956, Southwest Bell Telephone released a driver safety film entitled Appointment With Disaster. It also received an award from the National Committee on Films for Safety. The film was originally shown in theatres before being released on the nontheatrical circuit. Much of the film is concentrated on the discussion of reckless driving habits. It is made clear early in the film that only four of those drivers will survive and viewers must watch in suspense to discover who will not make it. And Then There Were Four tells the story of five drivers. They started out as cautionary tales about lives ruined, but drifted in more of a cinema verite direction, prioritizing discomforting visuals over real instructional information.Īnother Driver’s Ed scare film released in 1950 featured the voice of James Stewart. If the vintage driver's ed simulators were odd-looking, the instructional films - known as "scare films" - were simply terrifying. It didn't have wheels or a roof or a real engine, but it had a real Dodge Dart seat, steering wheel, and dashboard. Simulators of the '60s and '70s were designed by automobile manufacturers and approximated the look and feel of actual production models - so that teens could claim to have learned on, say, a Dodge Dart. The driving simulators became (and still are) a central feature of many driver's education classes, though later generations got to use something slightly cooler than the Drivotrainer.
Instruments recorded their performance, and issued a printout assessing their abilities. Students sat in this boxy simulator, watched an instructional film projected in front of them, and attempted to move the wheel, pedals and gear shift as necessary. In the early '50s, only about one percent of them were getting on-road instruction to solve the problem, insurance company Aetna invented the Aetna Drivotrainer which was introduced in Brooklyn in 1953. Neyhart's instruction used his own 1929 Graham-Paige (that's a car) for demonstration and test driving, but getting kids on the road one at a time was inefficient given the number of students. Neyhart began teaching driver's ed at State College High School in the mid-1930s, and authored the first textbook, The Safe Operation of an Automobile, in 1934.
Following an incdent in which his parked car was hit by a drunk driver, Neyhart began advocating for safety, and landed on the revolutionary idea that instilling safe driving habits in kids would make them better drivers for life, and thus decrease accidents on the road. Why pay to see Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the theater when they're showing Death on the Highway at school for free?ĭriver's education, the concept, was the brainchild of Amos Neyhart, a teacher of industrial safety at Penn State University. Over time, these films grew increasingly intense in their attempts to scare safe driving habits into young drivers. So-called "scare films" included stern warnings, tales of lives ruined by carelessness, scenes of twisted wreckage, even graphic bloody imagery from real crashes - nothing was out of bounds in the quest to keep teenagers from injury or death on the road. There was also driver safety, and back in the day, the "safety" component was all about scaring the bejeezus out of the kids. But mastering the mechanics of steering, shifting and braking wasn't the only reason teens were taking driver's ed. The simulators were contraptions that were supposed to approximate driving conditions, and many vintage simulators are still in use today. Though it has a longer history, driver's education since the '50s has two components nobody can forget: driving simulators and scare films.
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