Initially, I stumbled upon the Power Records archive and managed to complete my collection of every record I had owned since the age of five. Now, thanks to Twitpeep BNPositive, I am starting to recollect my somewhat tormented school years.
Surely there’s an archive where some over-eager AV geek has transferred all of those old filmstrips to video files. I’ve been dying to catch and relive all of those great presentations I slept through in the 5th grade, like “Indians: Someday We’ll Invent Political Correctness and Call Them Something Else,” “The Civil War: The Guns Were Fired Too, But We Can’t Show You That Part,” “Lazzaro Spallanzani: The Original Fear Factor Winner.” Heck, maybe I can finally see that one Charles Darwin strip that our school board banned. (This WAS the enlightened state of Mississippi, after all.)
I remember the joys of being told (as the teacher’s pet) to go down and get the projector. This no doubt meant 90 minutes of straining to listen to a scratchy old record that couldn’t be turned up too loud while Miss Campbell took a nap to try to quell the Vodka and Kool-Aid bender she had gone on with some of her old sorority sisters who had popped into town the night before.
Eventually, the LP was switched over to cassette-based units, which freakishly advanced the film strips automatically via some sort of demonic magic. Further research revealed that the machine was triggered via a subsonic tone that we never heard. It probably caused damage to everyone’s central nervous system, although I can’t prove this yet. The point being, it completely removed the glamour and only perk of being the teacher’s pet (and subsequently all classroom discipline, as there was no point in being nice anymore). I eventually exacted my revenge by figuring out (as the class audio genius) exactly how to sabotage the reels with a spit wad and tangle 30 minutes of tape up in the heads — effectively postponing the impending test for a few days while they copied a replacement tape from one of the other schools. Yes, the demonic “automated filmstrip advancing machine” provided our first clues that robots would one day become our benevolent overlords, but it also gave us valuable experience in how to defeat them.
