Does anyone else here recall a series of “multimedia presentations” that made the rounds in the 80’s as school assemblies? They uses audio, film, and slides (thus the “multi” in multi-media) to teach kids life lessons. We must have been shown at least 5 of them through Jr. high and high school. They always seemed to feature a vast array of Rush and Styx songs, and they were incredibly earnest about the subject matter. The one I recall the best was named “Shades” as in “Wear Your Own Shades”. It was about being yourself. Maybe they were only a So. Cal. phenomenon.
No, we had a couple of those. There was one called “The Prize” which was about how we should give each other the prize of self-esteem. Fishbone made an appearance, and I guarantee you not more than a handful of kids in the room had heard of Fishbone. My high school had as many black students as whites, and the black kids had no idea what their opinion of these mohawked, manic non-rap non–go-go African Americans was supposed to be.
[edit]Oh, this was in central Maryland.
I vaguely remember one we had in high school that featured INXS. Damned if I can remember what it was about, though.
You can wear your own shaaaaaaades…
Wear your own shades…
We had multimedia presentations by companies running summer camps, to try and sell us on school-sponsored trips to Cape Cod, in the hopes that we would convince our parents to pay for a week away.
Invariably, a few students would not get to go, and would instead spend the week playing board games with a substitute teacher. I was one of those three.
Our sub was an avid deep-sea fisher[wo]man, and brought in her prize dorado for show-and-tell.
You saw it! I’m sure the general consensus was that it was lame…but I still remember it, so it did its’ job.
Fishbone was a pretty big deal at my school, so I’m sure this one was/would have been well received.
Suicide prevention?? Badoom crash! I’ll be here all week…
You laugh, but it probably was…featured Big Country too
No, I was in SoCal in the 80’s, but I was too young for those. It seemed like an obvious joke though.
In the late 80s we that featured pre-Jesus, teen heart throb, Kirk Cameron yapping about getting high on life and not drugs. Every godamn time Kirk’s mug appeared on screen the girls would scream drowning out the loudspeakers. It got so annoying they had to stop it several times to dish out warnings that if they kept it up we’d all have to go back to class. That shut them right away.
Speaking of which, we did have D.A.R.E. assemblies a couple times.
Ha! He came to my high school in 1988 and he was very good. Ah to be a high school freshman again…
Hot Pursuit was big news here back in the late eighties. They even played the White House. Then the police chief pulled the plug on them since it cost massive amounts of overtime.
We didn’t have any of that in west Texas in the 80s. We did have two redneck macho paramedics talk about testicular cancer.
Life is stranger than fiction.
YES! I so remember the multimedia assembly in 7th or 8th in SoCal. It was one of a few bright spots in long, dark, boring, soul deadening life of prison classrooms. I was so pumped for days after the assembly! My few flashes of memory from it are of the Rush song Subdivisions, and people skydiving and skiing. there were 3 giant screens that covered the entire stage and a great sound system. How much more fulfilling my life would have been if at that age they taught me how to create that kind of multimedia experience. Instead they forced me to learn algebra which i have not used to this day 40 plus years later. I saw it at Spring View junior high in Huntington Beach in 82 or 83. Did you ever find out the name of it? Thanks
Must have been after my time (graduated high school in 1979). We barely had media, much less multi.