A/V Geeks Greatest Hits: Lessons learned

As proprietor of the Raleigh, N.C.-based A/V Geeks, Skip Elsheimer is a preservationist of America’s kitsch heritage. Elsheimer is the proud owner of about 18,000 educational and industrial 16mm films on topics as diverse as venereal disease, good hygiene, citizenship and the perils of pot. According to Mental Hygiene – Ken Smith’s tongue-in-cheek survey of the genre – between 1945 and 1970, companies such as Coronet and Sid Davis Productions produced thousands of films for captive audiences of school children and American workers.

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Elsheimer was smart enough to save them from the dustbin of history.

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His program, A/V Geeks Greatest Hits, offers audiences the opportunity to experience the full spectrum of educational film content. There is “Telezonia” (1974), a Fantastic Voyage into the proper operation of that newfangled doohickey, the telephone. And for the older and wiser kids, there is the surprisingly sexy “VD Is for Everybody” (1969), which uses a cast of real lookers to address social-disease communicability in this syphilitic’s answer to Coca-Cola’s 1960s-era globalism.

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Though the highs and lows of human experience are all here, it’s often the gimcrack set design and fashion chops in these vintage clunkers that really wow – the pot-holder sweater vests, ponytails decorated with yarn, hippies with crumb-catching mustaches, banana-seat bikes and a hard rain of Quaaludes and amphetamines to illustrate the dangers of drug addiction. It is hard to believe anyone would buy the goofball cause-and-effect of that pill-popper’s weather pattern in “Drugs Are Like That” (circa 1979). Co-produced by the Miami Junior League and narrated by Anita Bryant in this cheery little hand-slapper, a kid stealing cookies from a cookie jar is implied to be headed down a bad road to Bowery bum rolls and LSD parties.

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Though the Johnny Cash-esque soundtrack and gory on-the-job accidents in the Caterpillar Tractor Co.’s Shake Hands with Danger (1980) may inspire chortles from gore hounds and ecstatic sighs from blue-collar fetishists, most of the films are not exactly laugh-out-loud funny.

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They do, however, offer up potent little time capsules. These nuggets of outmoded fashion, behavior and psychedelic-era film convention can transport you back to the days of retainers and chalk dust quicker than a lick of a Tootsie Roll Pop. Kitsch is like that.

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A/V Geeks Greatest Hits. 8 p.m. Fri., July 6. $7 suggested donation. Eyedrum, 290 MLK Jr. Drive, Suite 8. 404-522-0655. www.eyedrum.org.

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For more hilarious stills from the program, click here.