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You are here: Home / TV & Movies / Movies / Signal 30

Signal 30

by @heymistermix.com|  April 17, 201210:04 am| 96 Comments

This post is in: Movies

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If you watched the latest Mad Men episode, you probably caught a glimpse of the drivers’ ed film Signal 30 (warning: gruesome). If you did, you may remember watching it or similar movies produced by the Ohio Highway Patrol in the 50s as part of drivers’ ed. I saw a few when I was 14, and they still remain a pretty potent memory. If you haven’t seen one and have a strong stomach, they’re worth watching just to get a glimpse of a really unique social document.

Though Signal 30 contains some obligatory, stilted health film moralizing, a large part of the narration is morbidly cynical. Starting with the title crawl (“most of the actors in this movies are bad actors and received top billing only on a tombstone”), it’s infused with a bleak tone that’s varied only with a little bit of dry black humor. Either the author hit the bottle pretty hard while writing the script, or he was one of the dreariest motherfuckers who ever walked the planet.

Along with the narration, the unvarnished sights and sounds of death and serious injury are riveting. Part of the reason I still remember these films is their brutal honesty about the hard and ugly facts of death, something that’s rarely seen in any movie, and certainly nothing I’d ever seen before in school.

I’ve always thought that drivers’ ed is a interesting educational challenge, since the point is simply to pound a few facts into the heads of everyone in attendance. One of those facts is that cars are dangerous machines capable of producing pain and death. I doubt if any piece of educational media has ever been as effective in making that point than the Ohio Highway Patrol films. I wonder if they’re still used.

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96Comments

  1. 1.

    Raven

    April 17, 2012 at 10:06 am

    I saw it but I wasn’t able to fiddle around with a co-ed during the screening!

  2. 2.

    Yutsano

    April 17, 2012 at 10:09 am

    I don’t think they teach driver’s ed in school in WA anymore. It’s all private instruction going by the large number of driving school I see popping up out of nowhere. No telling what the quality of those is.

    I personally blocked out a lot of the driver’s ed films. They were great sleep catch-up opportunities.

  3. 3.

    redshirt

    April 17, 2012 at 10:09 am

    Heh. I remember that film well. Loved it! Did nothing to deter my 16 year old need for speed.

    I took driver’s ed in Maine waaaaay back when. We had a special segment on “Dealing with Massachusetts drivers”. For good reason – they’re a menace!

    That would be an appropriate “Job in Hell”: Driver’s Ed Instructor in Mass.

    “OK – cut that guy off and flip him the bird!”

  4. 4.

    BGinCHI

    April 17, 2012 at 10:10 am

    The one they showed in my Driver’s Ed class (IN, early 80s) was called “Hamburger Highway.”

    I’ll never forget it.

  5. 5.

    jheartney

    April 17, 2012 at 10:11 am

    Part of the reason I still remember these films is their brutal honesty about the hard and ugly facts of death, something that’s rarely seen in any movie, and certainly nothing I’d ever seen before in school.

    Kids going through Driver’s Ed now grew up in a world where online videos of practically anything – sawing off heads, deadly crashes, horrible accidents, scary medical conditions – are easy to find if you go looking. I’d guess they are thoroughly desensitized.

  6. 6.

    cathyx

    April 17, 2012 at 10:11 am

    I had the opportunity to see it too when I was in highschool. I doubt that that film can be shown in public schools now.

  7. 7.

    ronobot

    April 17, 2012 at 10:11 am

    “What a terrible waste… Hi, I’m actor Troy McClure! You might remember me from such driver’s ed films as “Alice’s Adventures Through The Windshield Glass” and “The Decapitation of Larry Leadfoot.” For the next sixty minutes, we’ll be seeing actual film of car crash victims.”

  8. 8.

    Gus

    April 17, 2012 at 10:12 am

    Oh wow, do they not show these movies any more? I remember one called Mechanized Death, and that wasn’t the only one we saw. Also remember a cheesy dramatized one called Last Prom. Didn’t have much long term effect on me, I still drove like a shithead, didn’t wear seat belts and drank while driving as a kid.

  9. 9.

    rlrr

    April 17, 2012 at 10:14 am

    Required viewing when I was in high school…

  10. 10.

    Raven

    April 17, 2012 at 10:14 am

    They should have shown the same kind of shit in boot camp. I was recently with and old friend in San Fran. We were talking about the old days and he said to me, ” you and I met when you had just come home and I was just going. You asked me what my mos was (combat tracker) and then told me “you are going to get killed”. I had been in the Army for a year, infantry AIT and tracker school and NO ONE ever mentioned that I might get hurt”. In the Cambodian Excursion his team walked into an ambush and her was hit in the shoulder and the chin. Everyone else, including the dogs, were killed.

  11. 11.

    jheartney

    April 17, 2012 at 10:14 am

    My recollection of the gory driver’s ed films was that the sound and image were so bad that the people in them didn’t look human. It was like some odd form of abstract art.

    Also, too, the years since I went to HS have seen the golden age of gory slasher movies. Not real, but close enough that the real thing seems old hat.

  12. 12.

    Swishalicious

    April 17, 2012 at 10:14 am

    In my NJ high school about 10 years ago, there was absolutely nothing like this video – it was all rainbows, butterflies, and “maybe you should slow down when someone is trying to pass you.” This would have been very helpful to the attitudes of young drivers, methinks.

  13. 13.

    FridayNext

    April 17, 2012 at 10:15 am

    @BGinCHI:

    I think we saw Hamburger Highway as well.

    Of course this discussion puts me to mind of the classic Blotto song My Baby’s the Star of a Drivers Ed Movie.

  14. 14.

    rlrr

    April 17, 2012 at 10:17 am

    Here’s “Last Clear Chance” – not as graphic, though…

  15. 15.

    Schlemizel

    April 17, 2012 at 10:17 am

    I can still see some of the images from that film 40 years later. The guy half out of the car crushed by the door, the rod steal truck. Yeah, it was powerful but I wonder if it really changed anyones driving behavior.

  16. 16.

    Raven

    April 17, 2012 at 10:18 am

    @Schlemizel: Fuck no it doesn’t. “Speed on brother, hell’s only half full”!

  17. 17.

    rlrr

    April 17, 2012 at 10:18 am

    @Schlemizel:

    I remember the audio from some of the emergency calls being somewhat disturbing.

  18. 18.

    redshirt

    April 17, 2012 at 10:19 am

    I don’t think it ever truly occurred to my 16 year old self that “it could happen to me”. Rather, all those dead people were dumbasses and terrible drivers.

    Ah, male teenage years….

  19. 19.

    Raven

    April 17, 2012 at 10:20 am

    I spent a year in a full body cast and had rods put on my spine from a van wreck. When I started riding a bike I didn’t wear a helmet because I didn’t want my head alive and the rest of me not. Not very smart but what the fuck.

  20. 20.

    Jay C

    April 17, 2012 at 10:22 am

    From the comments on YouTube, apparently this film (or productions very much like it) ARE still being shown to Drivers’ Ed classes: and probably to the same effect they had on my DE class in 1968 (i.e., little-to-none).

    Although my first thought on seeing the footage of all that late-50s Detroit Iron all mangled up was: “So much for that old BS line about ‘big cars being safer'” You could probably make three modern cars from the materials in two of those tailfinned behemoths, and yet all that sheet metal didn’t seem have done the victims of “Signal 30” much good…

  21. 21.

    CaseyL

    April 17, 2012 at 10:22 am

    I can say they were still using those films in the 70s, when I took Driver’s Ed. Very traumatizing, though I don’t think it had all that much impact: teenagers in general, and teenage boys in particular, are impervious to that sort of thing.

    To be honest, I’m not sure how effective the old Signal 30’s would be today. So many of the things that killed people in collisions back then have been obviated by safety improvements (the biggest being, IMO, tempered glass that no longer creates long jagged shards when shattered) that kids are likelier to hoot at what would seem to them to be antiquated terror-mongering.

  22. 22.

    Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor

    April 17, 2012 at 10:23 am

    @redshirt:

    I took driver’s ed in Maine waaaaay back when. We had a special segment on “Dealing with Massachusetts drivers”. For good reason – they’re a menace!

    Only the smarter, faster, stronger drivers are worthy of survival.

  23. 23.

    Schlemizel

    April 17, 2012 at 10:23 am

    I don’t remember the name of the other film they showed us. It was about a kid riding in a car unbelted because the assumed it was safer “I’d be thrown clear”. He was thrown & fractured his spine. It was all so cheesy we sort of laughed at it while it was running. Then, at the end, they interview the actual kid – he is a quad with only a tiny bit of mobility in one hand. He was about our age. That one really hit home.

  24. 24.

    Nutella

    April 17, 2012 at 10:24 am

    I remember the steel rods from Signal 30 from high school in the 70’s but I remember even more clearly the film we saw in college biology class of childbirth with a closeup of the episiotomy. Snip. Snip. {{{{shudder}}}}

  25. 25.

    three dots

    April 17, 2012 at 10:25 am

    In the late 1970s, in northern New Jersey, the driver’s-ed film was “Highways of Agony.”

  26. 26.

    jibeaux

    April 17, 2012 at 10:25 am

    Cars are a lot different (and safer) than they were in the ’50s or the ’80s. Which is not to say that accidents don’t still happen, because around here there have been quite a number of fatal teenage car crashes, but every single one with an at-fault teenager that comes to my mind has involved binge drinking. Maybe I’m oddly actuarial, but it seems to me if they’re trying to stop run of the mill careless car accidents, might as well try reminding kids a) how pissed their parents will be and how they might lose their wheels, and b) what the already steep insurance premiums will look like.

  27. 27.

    Villago Delenda Est

    April 17, 2012 at 10:26 am

    @redshirt:

    “OK – cut that guy off and flip him the bird!”

    Yup, that’s your Mass driver, allright.

    I’ve experienced wild and crazy drivers on three continents, but nothing beats this woman who passed on the left and cut across three lanes of traffic stopped at the light to make a right turn, south of Seoul. Koreans are the craziest…they make Rome drivers look orderly and circumspect.

  28. 28.

    Wag

    April 17, 2012 at 10:27 am

    I’d like to make a version of these films focused on gun violence a mandatory part of gun safety education classes.

    The NRA’s head would explode.

  29. 29.

    Wag

    April 17, 2012 at 10:27 am

    I’d like to make a version of these films focused on gun violence a mandatory part of gun safety education classes.

    The NRA’s head would explode.

  30. 30.

    rlrr

    April 17, 2012 at 10:28 am

    @Wag:

    “Why do you hate America?”
    — the GOP

  31. 31.

    John

    April 17, 2012 at 10:28 am

    Teenagers know they will die just not for 50,000 years so no I’m sure the movies don’t have much effect.

  32. 32.

    Forum Transmitted Disease

    April 17, 2012 at 10:29 am

    The California version was entitled “Red Asphalt”.

    They need a new one to stop idiots from texting. Also, get off my lawn.

  33. 33.

    MattF

    April 17, 2012 at 10:29 am

    Grew up in NYC, so no driver’s ed. Did have a mandatory typing class, which was the only useful course I had in junior high.

  34. 34.

    Gin & Tonic

    April 17, 2012 at 10:31 am

    @Nutella: One of the things I remember most clearly from my first child’s birth nearly 30 years ago is the sound of my wife’s episiotomy. It’s not like “snip”.

  35. 35.

    Schlemizel

    April 17, 2012 at 10:32 am

    @Nutella:

    I got to watch an autopsy as part of a Boy Scout thing. It did cure me of ever wanting to smoke (not the point of the exercise just a lucky side affect). The guy had been a menthol smoker and his lungs were black and green. They dragged a scalpel across his liver & it ‘crunched’ from the calcification. I remember skipping lunch that day!

  36. 36.

    Schlemizel

    April 17, 2012 at 10:34 am

    @Forum Transmitted Disease:

    MN has a TV commercial with the girl still texting from inside the body bag. It makes the point pretty well but I still see an awful lot of it happening on the highway.

  37. 37.

    Villago Delenda Est

    April 17, 2012 at 10:34 am

    @Forum Transmitted Disease:

    Dead Man’s Curve:

    The street was deserted late Friday night
    We were buggin’ each other while we sat out the light
    We both popped our clutch when the light turned green
    You should have heard the whine from my screaming machine
    I flew past LaBrea, Schwab’s, and Crescent Heights
    And all the Jag could see were my six tail lights
    He passed me at Doheny then I started to swerve
    But I pulled her out and there we were
    At Dead Man’s Curve

  38. 38.

    Lex

    April 17, 2012 at 10:36 am

    Missed this in high school. Made up for it years later with several years as a cops reporter. One thing I learned is not that cars can kill you, which I already knew, but that unlike on TV, if you get hit hard in the head, it can fuck you up badly for life. THAT would be worth teaching kids, too, methinks.

  39. 39.

    Kinky Beats

    April 17, 2012 at 10:43 am

    In California, the movie the kids watch is “Red Asphalt”. We watched “Red Asphalt III” when I was in Driver’s ED (mid-90’s). I think I was more grossed out by the old-school computers that were seen in the film than I was by the traffic accidents.

  40. 40.

    Suffern ACE

    April 17, 2012 at 10:43 am

    I feel ripped off. In my drivers Ed we saw one movie put out by the State of PA about highway design safety (the PA Turnpike – Safest Road in the World) and one where people did an orange cone test before and after “just a few beers” administered by lab coat people. I am not sufficiently scarred. I know a lot about improved guard rail design, though. Those Quaker staters were quite clever back in the day.

  41. 41.

    ricky

    April 17, 2012 at 10:49 am

    I wonder if they still show the Zapruder film in Secret Service class?

  42. 42.

    Nylund

    April 17, 2012 at 10:51 am

    California’s Highway Patrol made a similar series called “Red Asphault“. By the time I took driver’s ed in the mid-90’s, they were no longer required viewing (I think), but most of the private driving schools still showed them, mainly because they were such a part of the “learning to drive” mythology that students damn near demanded to watch them. I could be wrong on that, but if memory serves, it was the students who insisted on watching it, not the instructors.

    I can recall a few scenes quite vividly still. One involved a motorcyclist and is probably the main reason why, all these years later, you could probably never convince me to get on motorcycle.

  43. 43.

    Boudica

    April 17, 2012 at 10:57 am

    I took driver’s ed in high school Virginia in ’81. I don’t remember the gore from the movies we watched. The only scene I remember was of one headlight coming down the opposite lane. You assume it’s a motorcycle. Then you see it’s a car with its left headlight out, half in your lane. Don’t know why that one stuck with me.

  44. 44.

    Boudica

    April 17, 2012 at 10:57 am

    I took driver’s ed in high school Virginia in ’81. I don’t remember the gore from the movies we watched. The only scene I remember was of one headlight coming down the opposite lane. You assume it’s a motorcycle. Then you see it’s a car with its left headlight out, half in your lane. Don’t know why that one stuck with me.

  45. 45.

    Boudica

    April 17, 2012 at 10:59 am

    Double post not my fault!!!

  46. 46.

    Kinky Beats

    April 17, 2012 at 10:59 am

    @Nylund: @Nylund:

    The one scene I remember the most was one in which the narrators start out by saying, “oh, this doesn’t look like such a bad wreck” before the video shows CHP officers picking up pieces of a brain off the highway. The narrators then are shocked and go “oh, no, no. What a shame!”

  47. 47.

    Boudica

    April 17, 2012 at 11:02 am

    And what about the Ann Landers/Dear Abby column (at least that’s where I read it)….Dear God I’m only 17. Remember that one? That stuck with me.

  48. 48.

    redshirt

    April 17, 2012 at 11:02 am

    @ronobot: Thank you for this reference. 100% required in this thread.

  49. 49.

    Southern Beale

    April 17, 2012 at 11:06 am

    I went through driver’s ed in the ’70s. They didn’t try to traumatize us with gruesome snuff films back then, they were Thinking Of The Children. So the only memorable driver’s ed film I remember is one about some old geezer who NEVER EVER GOT A TRAFFIC TICKET OR MOVING VIOLATION IN A HUNDRED BAZILLION YEARS OF DRIVING!!!! Turns out the key to his success was laying on the horn at every available opportunity. He called it “a friendly toot of the horn” but it was more like a constant blaring.

    Every time the old geezer said, “.. and I’ll just give him a friendly little toot of the horn” we all erupted in laughter.

  50. 50.

    Southern Beale

    April 17, 2012 at 11:09 am

    Well, damn. Looks like all you other 1970s models got the snuff films. Don’t know why my class wasn’t given this treat. Maybe I’ve blocked it from my memory?

  51. 51.

    Rosalita

    April 17, 2012 at 11:14 am

    @Gus:

    Oh wow, do they not show these movies any more? I remember one called Mechanized Death, and that wasn’t the only one we saw. Also remember a cheesy dramatized one called Last Prom. Didn’t have much long term effect on me, I still drove like a shithead, didn’t wear seat belts and drank while driving as a kid.

    Do I know you from school? They showed those same movies when I was in HS. I still drove like a shithead too.

  52. 52.

    Michael Bersin

    April 17, 2012 at 11:18 am

    Wheels of Tragedy.

    In high school in the 70s. Had an eccentric (that’s being diplomatic) driver ed instructor. As the film unfolded he kept saying, “Something’s going to happen.” At the instant of the crash, previously unobserved by any of us in the darkened classroom (he was standing at the back), he tossed a metal trash can across the room. We all went through the ceiling.

  53. 53.

    Brandon

    April 17, 2012 at 11:18 am

    Glad to see some folks relate these films to snuff films. I do think that the ‘Faces of Death’ anthology which really coopted these drivers ed snuff films made their continued use untenable. Once it became gruesome entertainment, it lost all educational value.

  54. 54.

    hieropants

    April 17, 2012 at 11:19 am

    I don’t remember too much about the videos we were shown in driver’s ed (PA, about ten years ago), but I do remember there was a scene where some mortuary guy was showing the plucky teenage narrators the livers of two people who’d died in a car crash because the driver was drunk. The driver was an alcoholic and his liver was stiff and gray, whereas his girlfriend’s was pink and squishy. The guy encouraged the narrators to poke their fingers into the two livers to feel the difference.

    There might have also been gory crash scene pictures, but that was the scene that stayed in my mind.

  55. 55.

    FoxinSocks

    April 17, 2012 at 11:26 am

    They forced us to watch one of these horrible movies before prom. Now, I wasn’t going to prom, I didn’t drink (and still don’t), and despite my love of horror movies, I’m very sensitive to actual gore/death, so the ten seconds I saw left me pretty traumatized.

    Meanwhile, the kids who did drink and drive were laughing it up and didn’t care. But I walked out of the auditorium and told them if they sent me back, I’d nail them for psychological abuse.

    So yeah, I really, REALLY, don’t like those films.

  56. 56.

    Forum Transmitted Disease

    April 17, 2012 at 11:26 am

    One involved a motorcyclist and is probably the main reason why, all these years later, you could probably never convince me to get on motorcycle.

    @Nylund: I was listening to some EMTs joking a few years back, as they related a horrific story about this guy who wrecked his bike. Killed his girlfriend (who was on the back) and tore his dick off (other parts too)…

    “The bad news is that you lost your dick. The good news is you don’t need it anymore.”

  57. 57.

    evap

    April 17, 2012 at 11:35 am

    I went through driver’s ed in New Jersey in the 70s and I remember these films.

    The one I remember best had the driver as a ghost walking around looking at all the weeping people (his family crying because he’s dead, the family of the girl he hit and killed crying, etc.)

    There’s a “live action” version of this going around, a girl texting in her car hits and kills another driver and she is then hauled off to jail in handcuffs. Some group goes around to schools and performs this little play.

  58. 58.

    patrick II

    April 17, 2012 at 11:37 am

    I have one horrible memory from those driver’s ed movies. It was of a truck driver carrying a load of water pipes about 3 inches in circumference. He came to a sudden stop, the stack of pips slid forward and diced him into about a hundred small cylinders. I think of that every time I see a truck load of pipe going by to this day.

    And no, you don’t have to thank me for sharing a memory.

  59. 59.

    geg6

    April 17, 2012 at 11:46 am

    It was the highlight of the class when we got to see “Signal 30” in Driver’s Ed in high school in the ’70s. It was almost a type of hazing by upperclassmen. They told all these gruesome stories about it, said that all the other movies they’d show in class couldn’t hold a candle to the mayhem in it, and that people would be throwing up and passing out from it. We were all terrified of it.

    It was pretty graphic and, as you say, cynical, but nothing like they had built it up to be. And, of course, I joined in the tradition of scaring the crap out of sophomores after me.

  60. 60.

    geg6

    April 17, 2012 at 11:55 am

    @Southern Beale:

    I went to high school in the 70s and the highway snuff films were pretty much all we did in that class other than when we were out on the road.

  61. 61.

    mike in dc

    April 17, 2012 at 11:55 am

    I just remember one called “Death on the Highway”, with a nearly-decapitated corpse recovered from a car collision with a truck. “Jim(the rookie trooper) didn’t look so good…”

  62. 62.

    Steve M.

    April 17, 2012 at 12:02 pm

    I don’t know if he really means Signal 30, but in his book Shock Value, John Waters refers to “Signal 13” as “a film I actually like.”

  63. 63.

    Satanicpanic

    April 17, 2012 at 12:03 pm

    Never saw it. My school (90’s) didn’t offer driver’s ed, you had to find someone to teach you.

  64. 64.

    Jager

    April 17, 2012 at 12:05 pm

    The facts about teen drivers are pretty grim.

    Half of all newly licensed teens get in an accident within 24 months of getting licensed by the DMV.

    Number one killer of teens, car accidents.

    Number one reason tens are hospitalized, car accidents.

    The average fender bender (no charges filed) in SoCal costs a teen’s family 4k. More if the car is is a high end model.

    In Califonia, teens are 14% of the population and are involved in over 40% of the car accidents. 2 thirds of the teens in those accidents are boys.

    Texting is the number 3 cause of accidents after speeding and and illegal lane changes. Amazing number of cell phones found on the floors of wrecked cars with text messages on the screen, like “where r u?”

    The weekend before Thanksgiving a local high school QB died of a drug overdose. (his asshat friends where afraid to call 911 because they’d get in trouble.) The same weekend 2 kids were killed in two separate car accidents. The QB’s death was front page news and prompted a “conference on drug abuse” nobody gave a rat’s ass about the kids killed behind the wheel.

    As a society we do a terrible job of teaching kids how to drive and drive safely. I invested my retirement funds to do something about it.

    http://www.drive-driverstraining.com/

  65. 65.

    Persia

    April 17, 2012 at 12:05 pm

    @BGinCHI: Mine too, in the 90s. The videos, sadly, are not that effective; teens have trouble internalizing the messages and don’t usually think that far ahead when they do dumb shit behind the wheel.

  66. 66.

    Laura Clawson

    April 17, 2012 at 12:05 pm

    Close to 20 years ago now for me (eesh), but we did see some of those in drivers ed. With helpful advance pointers from our teacher like “be sure to look over there to see where the guy’s head ends up.”

  67. 67.

    Spadizzly

    April 17, 2012 at 12:11 pm

    By the time I graduated HS, I was still too young to drive, so no Driver’s Ed for me, but I can’t forget seeing, as a 10 year old, the front page (NY Daily News) photo taken at the scene of the crash that killed Ernie Kovacs. It clearly showed Kovacs slumped halfway out of the car, still holding his trademark cigar. Fifty years on, it still spooks me.

  68. 68.

    PTirebiter

    April 17, 2012 at 12:14 pm

    I don’t remember any gruesome films but I do remember moving from the simulators to the brand new 1970 Dodge Challengers we got to drive. I also remember the California highway patrol dropping off a freshly totaled, blood spattered wreck every year. The display would sit on the quad for a week. I have better memories of my high school days in Long Beach.

  69. 69.

    bjacques

    April 17, 2012 at 12:15 pm

    In the Houston Bay Area in ’81, we had the usual high school coach teaching Driver’s Ed. “Mechanized Death” I think was the one we saw. Being an avid National Lampoon reader, of course I was already prepared, thanks to “Death Takes A Drink In The Driver’s Seat,” hosted by Uncle Buckle the Safety Buffalo, the Ohio State Patrol mascot. There was also “How To Drive Fast On Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed And Not Spill Your Drink,” by P. J. O’Rourke, back when he was funny.

    And the antidrug films…

  70. 70.

    patrick II

    April 17, 2012 at 12:21 pm

    I don’t know if it is still true, but in Indiana you could get your driver’s permit at sixteen with driver’s ed but had to wait until sixteen and six months without it. Everyone signed up for driver’s ed so they could drive six months earlier. I thought it was a pretty smart way to encourage high schoolers to take driver’s ed.

  71. 71.

    redshirt

    April 17, 2012 at 12:21 pm

    My High School had a recent tradition of dragging totaled vehicles and putting them in front of the main entrance as a warning to the rest of us. Two seniors died my Sophomore year and the car was displayed for the majority of the year. Again, I filed this under “dumbasses”. And they were – they crashed while driving with their lights off down a very hilly/turny road. It was a drunken dare.

  72. 72.

    Argive

    April 17, 2012 at 12:45 pm

    When I was 14 or so, five local teenagers died when the driver was DUI (I think they were all sniffing paint) and hit a tree. The state’s (PA) response to this tragedy was to prohibit kids from getting their full driver’s license at 16. Now, when you turn 16, you get a learner’s permit and have to complete 50 hours of driving with a licensed adult in the car and complete a driver’s ed course before you can get your license (and until you hit 18, you have an 11:00 curfew). Mainly what I remember from driver’s ed was a bunch of instructional videos that all had horrible, corny songs about watching out for no-zones or whatever.

    @ronobot:

    “This guy’s appealing . . . they’re ‘a-peeling’ him off the sidewalk!”

    HOMER: “Heehee! It’s funny ’cause they don’t know him.

  73. 73.

    woesinger

    April 17, 2012 at 12:47 pm

    If it’s graphic PSAs about dangerous driving (and texting while driving in particular), look no farther than Ireland:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGUK1BqPANI

    Warning – this is pretty bloody.

  74. 74.

    GlenInBrooklyn

    April 17, 2012 at 12:54 pm

    I remember Signal 30 from 45 years ago, and in Ohio. It was pretty intense (not that that slowed me down a few years later).

  75. 75.

    Grover Gardner

    April 17, 2012 at 12:56 pm

    In the same vein, anyone remember “The Child Molester”? Ngah, ngah, ngah….

  76. 76.

    Uncle Cosmo

    April 17, 2012 at 1:14 pm

    Don’t recall any such film in Driver’s Ed from summer 1966 just outside of Baltimore. I think I would’ve remembered it.

    Somewhat on topic, but over at GOS there was a guy who called himself “The Baculum King” who out of his years as a long-haul trucker would publish an extremely well-written diary every Memorial Day & Thanksgiving about sharing the road with 18-wheelers. This thread reminded me of his endnote to the narration of a particularly gruesome fatal wreck:

    Out of compassion I have no doubt that the family of the dead was told, as is standard in car/truck wrecks, that the dead “died instantly”. Based on 15 years and some million-and-a-half miles on American roads, and witnessing dozens (or hundreds) of such crashes, I can tell you it’s rarely actually true. What it really means is that the fate of the dead was sealed upon impact, regardless of how long it took them to get there.

    His whole diary is worth a read. Along with other things–including the story of a friend who came about 3 inches from being impaled by a steel beam dropped by a semi that crashed through his windshield & drove microscopic glass shards into his unprotected face that were still being extruded a year later–I tread very, very carefully around the big rigs these days.

  77. 77.

    trollhattan

    April 17, 2012 at 1:15 pm

    @Forum Transmitted Disease:

    “Red Asphalt” was the classic shown in Washington, also, too. I don’t recall the name but another film we saw began with brains (bwaaains!) bobbing in a lab sink, with one being sliced like a meatloaf at some point in the tale.

    Good times.

  78. 78.

    cthulhu

    April 17, 2012 at 1:15 pm

    @Forum Transmitted Disease: I did see Red Asphalt in the early eighties in CA as well. It was produced by OHP as were a few other of the films they showed but that were just regular non-gruesome driver’s ed films. As I recall you could elect not to watch Red Asphalt but, of course, none of the boys, at least, would make that social error.

    I sort of remember in that movie there was one vignette that involved a crash due to carbon monoxide leaking into the car because the car was poorly maintained. The driver and passenger were black as I recall and the acting during the “before” re-enactment struck me as pretty damn racist but maybe I am thinking of something else; it was a long time ago.

    While I am not surprised they might still show the old black and white OHP movies some places, the research on persuasion indicates that such scare tactics don’t generally work (same for discouraging smoking, drugs, STDs, industrial accidents, etc.). You scare someone too much and they either tune out or cognitively work harder to internally justify why it won’t happen to them. You instead want to create only a moderate amount of fear or anxiety and somehow connect it to the viewer’s personal experience/attitudes. Not easy to do with teens in any case.

  79. 79.

    trollhattan

    April 17, 2012 at 1:28 pm

    @bjacques:

    Cripes, I remember Uncle Buckle the Safety Buffalo, too. So funny. P.J. had a great stint at Car and Driver after the Lampoon–one of his best bits was on the handling qualities of pickup trucks, which he compared to those of a front porch.

    He was damn funny before discovering his inner wingnut.

  80. 80.

    stickler

    April 17, 2012 at 1:38 pm

    In the ’80s the Washington State Patrol had a pretty slick, multiple-screen slideshow setup called “Friday Night Live,” as I recall. One of the main characters/victims was a paraplegic from the next little farm town over from the one I grew up in. We knew her family.

    Besides her tragic tale, I remember the countdown/deconstruction of a sedan hitting a telephone pole: “1 second: engine compartment compresses; 2 seconds: engine dislodges from its mounts; 3 seconds: engine enters passenger compartment; 4 seconds: driver’s legs are crushed by the engine …” It got worse after that, as I recall.

    I still drove like an idiot, but at least I knew how it would go down if I ever hit a telephone pole. (Though I was driving a 1970 Ranchero with a 351 V8 and a happy rear end, so I probably would have hit the telephone pole backwards.)

  81. 81.

    DaddyJ

    April 17, 2012 at 1:49 pm

    @Southern Beale: I’d forgotten about the “friendly toot of the horn” guy until you mentioned it; my DE class (mid-70s, Nebraska) found that highly amusing too. We also watched a couple of gore films, one of which I think was Signal 30.

    I can’t say those movies didn’t have an effect. Now that my daughter has her learner’s permit, I think of them every time she makes a panic left turn in front of oncoming traffic (“But, Dad, the guy behind me is honking his horn!”)

  82. 82.

    Ruckus

    April 17, 2012 at 2:09 pm

    @Schlemizel:
    It doesn’t change anyone. Runs along with things like not wearing a helmet on a bike, it can’t happen to me. Ahhh, youth. Most of us never saw much past the next day or maybe next meal. Without that youthful enthusiasm/optimism I can’t imagine very many signing up for the military or buying that motorcycle or skydiving or bungee jumping or starting our own business or…
    Maybe the kids who are looking forward are the ones contemplating, trying or succeeding at suicide.

  83. 83.

    Ruckus

    April 17, 2012 at 2:20 pm

    @Villago Delenda Est:
    I liked the Naples taxi driver. Passing everyone on the left on the train track that ran down the middle of the tunnel we were in. With a red light at the end that he was not stopping for, and a train coming down the track right at us. I’ve been massive coronary level panicked racing a bike in the rain at 150 and that’s nothing to that taxi ride. But then it didn’t happen to me, I survived both unmarked. Physically.

  84. 84.

    Paul in KY

    April 17, 2012 at 2:25 pm

    @Villago Delenda Est: That’s a freaky song cause Jan Berry later crippled himself at the same curve.

  85. 85.

    Paul in KY

    April 17, 2012 at 2:30 pm

    Saw Signal 30 in 1976. Remember the guy who got hit by a train & burned to death. A crispy critter as they removed his body from the wreckage.

    I will not check out the link. Don’t need to.

  86. 86.

    Birthmarker

    April 17, 2012 at 2:33 pm

    Didn’t take Driver’s Ed but I do remember some gross lung cancer movies.

    When I taught school someone brought their beautiful brain damaged wheelchair bound daughter to the prom promise meeting, where kids are asked to sign a pledge not to drink and drive on prom night.

    The Mom showed slides of the girl participating in normal activities before the injury.

    The young lady had zero awareness of her surroundings.

  87. 87.

    Arclite

    April 17, 2012 at 3:07 pm

    Saw them in driver’s ed in the 1980s. Really grainy and worn, but they did the trick into scaring us to wear seatbelts and not drink and drive.

  88. 88.

    Barry

    April 17, 2012 at 3:22 pm

    @Jay C: “Although my first thought on seeing the footage of all that late-50s Detroit Iron all mangled up was: “So much for that old BS line about ‘big cars being safer’” You could probably make three modern cars from the materials in two of those tailfinned behemoths, and yet all that sheet metal didn’t seem have done the victims of “Signal 30” much good…”

    You can search YouTube for some videos of this – modern cars go through the old Big Iron like a .50 cal machine gun bullet through chainmail.

  89. 89.

    James E. Powell

    April 17, 2012 at 3:39 pm

    At Brecksville (Ohio) High we watched “The Last Prom.” It was so hokey that some of us could not stop laughing. I think the fact that about one kid per year was killed in an accident had more impact, but certainly not enough to eliminate typical teen driving behavior, i.e., recklessness.

  90. 90.

    Death Panel Truck

    April 17, 2012 at 4:19 pm

    Signal 30 is available for viewing or downloading at the Internet Archive as part of the Prelinger Archives

    Part one: http://archive.org/details/Signal301959

    Part two: http://archive.org/details/Signal301959_2

  91. 91.

    ninja3000

    April 17, 2012 at 4:22 pm

    @Spadizzly: And BTW, Ernie Kovacs’s death was the result of his Corvair rolling over…

  92. 92.

    walden

    April 17, 2012 at 4:34 pm

    Didn’t click the links, but I remember seeing Signal 30 and the Last Prom in about 1970-71. I wonder how these would play nowadays — Back then there was nothing really comparable. Nothing really violent on broadcast TV (even gunshots were sanitized), cable TV was only for getting regular TV if you lived in the mountains (community antennas – CATV), there were no video games and so no violent video games — pinball, people; and the horror movies were only beginning to get out of the cheesy and into the gross.

  93. 93.

    M. Bouffant

    April 17, 2012 at 6:50 pm

    This (a dramatization) is shown on the air in California.

  94. 94.

    BruceJ

    April 17, 2012 at 8:25 pm

    @Forum Transmitted Disease: Red Asphalt was the one we saw,too.

    Even back in those dark ages of the early 70’s these films were as dated as the anti-drug films we saw which were all 1960’s hollywood hippie things.

    Then there was the guy they brought into our health class to teach us about the dangers of drugs, who was actually some old wino off the streets of Saint Louis (seriously, they imported an ex-skid-row wino from Saint Louis to Tucson to give this talk) to tell us about when he drank Sterno and Aqua Velva and don’t do that, kids.

    Oooookaaaay!

  95. 95.

    Paul in KY

    April 18, 2012 at 9:47 am

    @walden: Good point. You did see some gory footage of Vietnam on the nightly news once in a while. Except for that, no really graphic gore.

  96. 96.

    BruinKid

    April 19, 2012 at 7:54 pm

    Yep, Red Asphalt for me too here in California. Think it was the 3rd version of it by the time I saw in the 1990s.

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