In this holiday Substitute Teachercast we present another educational film from the golden years of American 16mm (1969). This is “Drug Abuse: The Chemical Tomb.” The title says it all. 

We talk about the tragic but probably fictional story about 15 year old Alice and her decent into drug abuse as portrayed in the 1973 made for tv movie Go Ask Alice. 

We talk about the 1973 Oil Crisis. Obviously. 

We talk about the 1974 film The Parallax Movie starring Warren Beatty and talk about how paranoia and distrust of institutions sunk roots deep into the American psyche during the long seventies. 

We talk about the eccentric and brilliant jazz musician/band leader Sun Ra’s 1974 movie Space Is the Place and its connection to Afrofuturism and Afrofuturism’s 20th century roots in new religious movements. 

We talk about the giant boom in imported Japanese musical gear during the Long Seventies and what effect it had on music during and after the time period. 

We talk about 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a seminal film in the annals of the horror genre and doing a little brainstorming as to why the movie was so frightening to audiences of the Long Seventies. 

In 1971 a small group of anti-war activists successfully pulled of a plot to break into an FBI office, steal secret files & get them published by a major newspaper, beginning the process of outing COINTELPRO.

We talk about the 1970 documentary Chariots of the Gods based on Erich Von Daniken’s book the spawned the ancient aliens craze. Also some rambling about memetic theory and how the west went through an epistemic crisis in the Long Seventies. 

We talk about the history of American MONEY, banking & Nixon closing the Gold Window in 1971 after a bank run on the Federal Reserve and Fort Knox.