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A teenage social guidance film from 1947.
No; girls who park in cars are not really popular. Not even with the boys they park with.
If you know about Mystery Science Theater 3000, you’ve seen these kinds of films before. If not, well, the crew of the Satellite Of Love often watched (and took shots at) the school films of yesteryear; the kind where characters that say things like “shucks”, “gee, Mister” and “golly.”
This short film, Are You Popular?, is a riot, and I can see Crow, Tom Servo and the gang having a lot of fun with it. Though it’s definitely got potential as MST3K material, it was never made into an episode, and this is the original film. Watch it. It is hilarious. If you’d like to, play the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Home Game and riff on the movie yourself. Trust me, it’s fun.
These kinds of films created a fictional version of the 1940s (or so) that I thought, for the longest time, was 100% real. I was totally convinced that people literally talked the way that these characters did, with their sensible clothes and their calling things “swell” all the time. Of course I thought that — these kinds of films were basically my only exposure to ’40s life. It still seems a little creepy to me today that as soon as the camera stopped rolling, the actors probably went and cussed and smoked and did things that, well, real people do.
