One Got Fat: 1962 bike safety film uses macabre monkey masks

Roger says: "Here's a review of an extremely weird vintage bicycle safety film from 1962 in which a group of kids show us the dangers of disobeying bicycle safety rules - all while wearing some of the creepiest monkey masks you'll ever see."

The typeface used in the title is excellent.

Link | Link to YouTube video

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Antinous

Dead teenagers are hilaaaarious! When did Sartre write a bike safety script?
Sputnik

The Bastard Fairies used this for their video for their song “We’re all going to hell”. Sick, and catchy as all get-out.
mindysan33

Oh, how I loooove this video. It’s been ages since I’ve seen it. The archives are such a treasure trove of awesomeness, which is where I originally saw this one (in the heady days before the youtube)!

Thanks for posting it!

Mindysan
QuinacridoneRose

Crazy! a friend of mine just showed this to me. And then he also showed me this :

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Ha44nh0RK7U

It’s the video cut and set to Therion’s ‘Wine of Aluqah.’ It works disturbingly well.
Anonymous

Migawd, I remember this one from when it was new…
Wickedashtray

#4
absolutely brilliant stuff. Thanks for posting it.
Keneke

So much to say…

- Furry enabler! ;)

- “Slim” looks like the average kid today, sigh.

- So…much…death…

- Neat that the narrator is the same guy from Fractured Fairy Tales!
turncoat_tendrils

Jake0748:
I though it was Burgess Meredith, too.
progosk

also re-used in:
- Dr. Dog “Fool’s Life”
- The Weather “In Denial”
- Goddamn Electric Bill “Lost In The Zoo”
- The Lamps “20 Inches Of Monkey”
- Shins “Fighting in a Sack”
Mecharius

A group called Goddamn Electric Bill uses this footage for a video to their song Lost in the Zoo. It goes pretty well together.
robparrish

Nice re-mix of this footage here –
http://pouringdown.tv/?p=170
Ape Lad

The Ralph Hulett in the credits was a background artist for Disney.
haineux

Yes, that’s Edward Everett Horton narrating.

He was at his best in “Top Hat” with Fred Astaire, or perhaps you think he’s better as the narrator of the “Fractured Fairy Tales” segment of “The Bullwinkle Show.”
Anonymous

Footage also appears in unofficial Black Francis “Bluefinger” video for “Tight Black Rubber (Ain’t No Chippia, Man).”

All this plus the videos list in comments above. Nice “discovery.”
bjimba

Gee, I thought Horton was at his best as Roaring Chicken in “F Troop”.
CNTower911

Strange.. No one is wearing a helmet?!?!?
neven

A minor correction: those titles are hand-lettered. That’s not a typeface.
MrBaliHai

Mark, Mark, Mark…how could you fail to highlight the gratuitous double-entendre dialogue in that clip?

“Slim knew that his big sack would be hard to handle.”
Coaster

That was….odd.

The narrator was so smug each time one got killed.

The creepiest thing was how they all kept going after each death, like some sort of Twilight Zone episode or something. And they didn’t play. Kids play.

But I gotta wonder why the human child was hanging out with a bunch of mutants. Mutants with rather slow reaction times.

Disturbing, on so many levels….
mastercontroller

I first saw this on archive.org.

Liked it so much, I used it in a video for Guster’s Satellite:
juliasaurus

OMG for YEARS I’ve been trying to find this video. They showed it once in Elementary school and freaked me right the hell out. Since then, I’ve told people about and no one knew what I was talking about. I started to think that I made it up in a dream or something.
Beanolini

As hinted at by #3, ‘One Got Fat’ is also available to stream or download from archive.org- right here.
dannysland

The evolutionary biology message of the film is clear: in the struggle for food, your strategy should be to wait patiently as your rivals kill themselves.
supersheep

Myself and my band did a alternative soundtrack for this late last year for a performance organised by an art collective in London (we did it down at Shunt Vaults, if you know it.) It was so dark, sinister and downright creepy with the jolly jolly orchestra removed. Watch it with the sound down.
unclemike

My 6th grade teacher showed us this way back in the 70s. It totally creeped me out, particularly when the camera keeps cutting back to the lunch bags in the basket with the (now-dead) kid’s name written on them.
License Farm

“Why don’t they LOOK??”
Jake0748

Rats! I watched the whole thing thinking it was Burgess Meredith narrating. Of course the previous posters are right, it was Edward Everett Horton. But now I’ll have to go and do a whole big search to see if their voices are that similar, or if I’m just loopy. Entertaining video nevertheless, I wish I had seen it in 3rd grade.