Educational filmstrip from the Society for Visual Education. This recording has an "inaudible" frame advance signal (30/50Hz) for automatic-advance filmstrip projectors. What were filmstrips? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filmstrip for information. If you have the actual film that goes with this recording, please message me as I have the equipment to preserve it. If you have access to any filmstrips, filmstrip records or tapes, or full sets, please message me also, as no one is preserving this type of multimedia. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOBc7gl4Kxs

Occasionally you find one of those releases that's a real singularity; a real perfect storm. One of those albums that really un-blurs the line between music as art and music as entertainment. A stark reminder that those without a trace of natural instinct for the medium have access to the same tools as the greats. This is truly one of the defining titles of the Uncommon Ephemera collection. One almost doesn’t know where to start. What really makes Fritzie Locke’s “I’m On The Potty” unintentionally hilarious? The cover is quite striking: direct; blunt, a little on-the-nose. Clearly, it is attractive to parents who have exhausted all other methods by which you can teach a child not to soil his or her pants. But for those with a weirder-than-usual sense of humor, it draws you in; it’s not “what is this?” but more “what could this possibly sound like?” Upon starting the cassette, one immediately feels a conflicting sense of regret and misanthropic pleasure. The discount-MIDI milieu; the early 90s digital reverb making the chasm between innovative-if-overcommercialized synthpop and the Kung Fury soundtrack seem even bigger than it was; that infernal linear-arithmetic-synthesis cowbell. The range of emotions felt by a lover of music in the first ten seconds is so intense, one wonders why the Food and Drug Administration isn’t somehow involved. And then it happens. The vocals. You slowly realize that Ms. Locke, in the cloistered echo chamber of a wealthy downstate New York suburb, has slaved away at the gargantuan task of rewriting the lyrics to public-domain nursery rhymes; they’re wretched, but all of her friends think they’re clever. Like a dime-store Weird Al Yankovic who plays a lot of Mary Kay parties, Locke’s potty parodies must have found an audience too ignorant or too scared not to applaud. (Perhaps she was the president of the condo board in her development; drunk with power; her neighbors dare not speak ill.) But there is so much passion here, so much fearless assertion that, yes, these are in fact the lyrics, one can’t help but to watch in awesome wonder at the confidence with which the product presents itself. A line in the title track, meant to illustrate a celebration, reads “Shakin’ bells are ringing.” Well, of course they are. They’re being shaken. Could you not be bothered to open an encyclopedia to even consider figuring out what those type of bells are called? Perhaps this is a pain felt primarily by writers, but I can attest, every time that line goes by, it feels like I have a cavity. Other classics are similarly molested and left to die; “London Bridge is falling down”? Of course not. “Diapers falling on the ground, on the ground, on the ground.” “Here We Go Loopy Loo”? Nope. “ ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=428mw-bQlqU

... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbRVUT0qjRc

Desperately seeking sound filmstrips like this one to preserve! Nobody in America is properly preserving them but me, and most have already been thrown away. E-mail uncommon.ephemera@gmail.com if you can help. These videos cannot be monetized. Any ads are being run by YouTube. If you want to help me keep preserving media, become a patron at https://patreon.com/uncommonephemera While many of the items preserved here at Uncommon Ephemera are by definition uncommon due to their low production quality, cultural anachronism, or defeat in the marketplace of ideas, occasionally something gets forgotten that truly shouldn't have. Because the sound filmstrip had been completely neglected by every media preservationist on earth until now, the format's disappearance took with it a few forays by well-known creators. Stan and Jan Berenstain were a husband-and-wife duo of illustrators and authors who found success in their books about a family of bears who face common family problems. After Stan's death in 2005 and Jan's death in 2012, their son Mike assumed ownership of the franchise, and publishes new books to this day. Paratore Pictures' adaptation of "The Bike Lesson" here is extremely straightforward, with every frame transferred directly from Stan and Jan's original artwork and every word of their text spoken verbatim, with only appropriate inflection added. (Viewers of a certain age will recognize Jim Thurman, who voices Papa Bear, as Teeny Little Super Guy, the sentient orange juice glass from Sesame Street.) As with the "Goodnight Moon" filmstrip preserved previously, this is the right way to do it, as not to diminish the original work. In "The Bike Lesson," Papa Bear has bought Small Bear a brand new bike. Despite Small Bear's requests to ride it, Papa Bear insists he must teach him how to ride it, with every lesson inevitably ending in disaster. Mama Bear clicks her tongue knowingly at the end, having known this would happen all along, but Small Bear is grateful his father, at the very least, showed him what not to do. By the 1990s, the archetype of a know-it-all husband and father who was actually a bumbling idiot with no self-awareness had become a lazy trope to make TV commercials perform better among the demographic traditionally most likely to buy groceries for the household, and those who did not grow up with the Berenstain Bears might be forgiven for thinking early Bears books were some prototype of the coming Madison Avenue matriarchy. But Stan and Jan were in fact lovers of vaudeville, Abbot and Costello, and the Marx Brothers, and channeled these influences in crafting Papa Bear's over-confident crash-and-burn persona, and viewed in that context it makes perfect sense (their editor at the time was also Theodore Geisel - literally Dr. Seu ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gPSGvAgYPw