Maiming at the chocolate factory

Great commentary, as usual, by Tom...

From me: "Yikes! I wonder if the oompa loompas pushed her..." Click the following to access the sent link: Baby's Hand Severed at Chocolate Factory - Yahoo! News

From Tom: "It seemed like every family vacation from age 7 to 14 involved a side trip to tour some stay-on-the-yellow-line-or-you'll-get-dismembered factory. The Kellogg's plant, and a Ford plant, somewhere around Detroit, were the most memorable. I remember the Kellogg's plant had these rotating ovens like cement mixers for the corn flakes. Car plants: Very clanky and sparky. Also the Hershey plant in Pensylvania. Breweries in Wisconsin seemed safer, and smelled good. At some level I think I'm still expecting to be impaled on a forklift which then goes out-of-control through a smelter."

You mean something like this? (I don't know if this was honestly intended to be a German safety video with a sense of humor, or if it was just supposed to be funny and never meant at all to be in any way educational... See what you think! As the refering page says, "Starts out slow, but give it time. Knowledge of German not necessary.")

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Shades of that song the 'Bots sang in that Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode FUGITIVE ALIEN II, "He tried to kill me with a forklift! Ole!"

When I was in 7th and 8th grade, our shop class teacher would, whenever he was indisposed, show this safety film called THE ROLL OF DRUMS, which depicted various grisly construction demises. Kids drive a bulldozer into a being-excavated basement because the driver forgot to lock it up for the night. A guy gets decapitated by an earthmover when he forgets to secure the blade and crawls under it to do maintenance. Two guys are drag-racing earthmovers and one goes flying out into a lake.

(After showing the film one time, our teacher intoned, "that guy broke 6 ribs filming that scene!" This must have been info passed down through the Shop Teacher Grapevine).

The film was legendary, and it seems like we must have seen it multiple times in those two years. Maybe any time we had a substitute teacher. One of those films that got dragged out of the audio-visual closet at any opportunity; similar to films in earlier grades like THE RED BALLOON or that one with the toy-wooden-canoe-with-an-Indian-in-it getting gradually washed downstream to the ocean (PADDLE TO THE SEA). But I already knew all about THE ROLL OF DRUMS from my brother, 6 years before.

Oddly, I can only find this on the Internet about it:

THE ROLL OF DRUMS: SHAKE HANDS WITH DANGER. 23 minutes, Caterpillar (1966).

Uses short skits and professional actors to show the results of careless equipment maintenance techniques.

Michelle-aneous Musings said...

I've got a friend up here whose dad was a shop teacher... I'll ask him if he knows about it! (Heck, maybe he even owns the thing!)

Michelle-aneous Musings said...

From today's "Boing Boing":

"Jerry Beck of Cartoon Brew has a entry about a 1946 Disney / General Motors film called 'ABC's of Hand Tools.' (The illustrations are by Walt Kelly of Pogo the Possum fame. Thanks, Steve!) They made a booklet of the same name and a kind soul scanned it and made it available as a PDF."