I remember the Red Balloon - I only saw it once. There's no dialogue or anything, right? It's just a balloon flying around? Isn't it French or something.

I remember not getting the point of that.


In second grade, our teachers showed us the Gremlins. My mom called the principal the next day. SCARY.

The French couldn't get enough. They had to go and make a full length version, starring Juliette Binoche and coming out this year!

Yeah, it's the wordless story of this little boy with no friends. A red balloon follows him to school. They become friends and have adventures. Bullies pop the balloon. All the balloons in paris go free from their masters and lift the boy in the sky.

It's 30 minutes of wordless, colorless bliss.

"Mr Limpit" - part animation/part live action with Don Knotts as an animated fish - played on continuous loop at my Elementary School........was pretty brutal after awhile.....man, that dates me

Does anyone remember the one about the little indian in a boat the kid carved, with the message etched in the bottom of it that said "Please put me back in the sea"? The movie charts the course of that little boat all the way to the ocean.

I always liked that one.

Heck, I always liked when they showed movies in class. Didn't matter which movie.

In ninth grade, it was a big deal that they showed the 60's romeo and juliet that had nudity. Our teacher said we could handle it because we were above-level. I don't think any of the guys in my class dealt with the situation in a Godly manner.

I think I remember the red balloon movie, but not from school. There used to be something on Saturday afternoons (?) called The Children's Film Festival -- I suppose this was the early 70s or maybe late 60s. I'm dating myself. But I think that's when I saw it. I'm not sure it made a huge impression, but then -- I still remember it so it must have made more of an impression than I thought.

But I remember watching "Brian's Song" at school in high school. I'm not sure why we watched it -- but I wasn't complaining. Maybe it was the coach/history teacher who showed it. Maybe it was supposed to encourage us to be more accepting of people of other races (which now that I think about it is kind of ironic since I went to high school in southern Indiana and I'm not sure there were any black students in our school). If you remember, it's the story of Brian Piccolo and Gayle Sayers -- good movie and very sad.

Also, I loved "Mr. Limpit." But we never watched it at school.

I'm 51 and many of the classes I was in were victimized by that movie too. Where is the humanity!

Bill, I just read that one aloud to my daughter; it's Holling C. Holling's Paddle to the Sea. I didn't realize there was a movie.

My elementary music teacher always made us watch Night on Bald Mountain from the original Fantasia. Kind of intense for kindergarteners if you ask me.

Never saw the Red Balloon movie, but had a wordless children's picture book of the story - I now know that the pictures were stills from the movie. The pictures were beautiful, but I thought the story was depressing and never wanted to look at the book.

Films in school? We rarely watched any in my private Christian school. The occasional educational film, but I can't recall any that we watched more than once.

Bill, that's "Paddle to the Sea." It's a movie??? I remember the children's book well, but had no idea it was a movie.

There's a theme here (read the book, didn't see the movie) that my college roommate used to tease me about. He was shocked to know that "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" was in fact a book by Roald Dahl. It was news to me (at the time) that it had been made into a movie. It became a running joke with us that whenever he'd mention a movie and ask if I'd seen it, my response was likely to be "no, but I read the book."

Oh, yeah, The Red Balloon was a school staple in my childhood. Amazingly, as a military brat, I lived in many regions and went to a lot of schools and I think I saw it at every school I went to until high school.

In second grade, our teachers showed us the Gremlins.

Man, that statement makes me feel old. I was in high school when that came out and I saw it in the theater. *sigh*

I never got The Red Balloon, either. I remember in High School "Incident at Owl Creek" and "The Lottery", both sort of chilling.
Those were the old pre-VCR days, when we were at the mercy of the educational film catalog.

When I was a kid, every time the teachers didn't know what to do with us, we watched "The Hound That Thought He Was a Racoon". I probably saw that 20 times over the years.

My husband says he was tortured with repeated viewings of "Shane". I've never seen it, and I'm sure I never will with him.

Incident at Owl Creek was one I only saw once. But it affected me a lot so I remember it vividly.

Creepy

I remember in 2nd grade we got to watch the Electric Company sometimes. I loved it whenever Spidey showed up on an episode. Let's see, that would have been around... *sound of static*

No real repeats, but I had a teacher in middle school who was inordinately fond of those old Bible movies from the '40s and '50s. Everything from Ben-Hur to The Ten Commandments. (Now that I think about it, I have no idea what she was thinking.)

I had the book of The Red Ballon - with photos from the movie. Funny - I can still see the pictures in my head - but I don't remember the movie. I'm sure I saw it though.

What traumatized me were the bus safety films that ended with horrible crashes and blood and vomit and such. The one where the bus crashed into the lake and everyone drowned... Now there's schooldays nostalgia.

We didn't have such new-fangled media when I was in school. We watched the shadows on the cave wall in the firelight and told stories of the great wars against the Neanderthals.

so then I was born in the 80s...and I went to a Catholic school and we never watched movies.

Ya'll came for schools with money. We had no movies to watch nor did we have a way to watch them. We had to read real books, poor underprivileged kids that we were.

I was homeschooled! HAHA! I avoided lousy movies! On the other hand, I had to go to college to meet girls who weren't my sister...

My first grader just came home from school talking about how much she hoped recess would be rained out again so that they could finish watching the episode of Punky Brewster they were watching! Who'd have thought that old 80's sit-coms would be today's Red Balloon???

I saw The Red Balloon, too - completely forgot the plot, if there was one.

The only other school movie I remember is a nonfiction filmette about the daily life of a woman born with no arms. The part I remember is when she goes to the grocery store - she wears sandals and uses her feet as hands, which undoubtedly raises some eyebrows in the audience when she's in the produce section...

I remember watching real reel to reel movies in elementary school, but no titles or images come to mind.

The Red Balloon was eerily imprinted in my memory banks as well--must have been a late 70s thing. I saw it again as an adult and thought, "that's it?!" In my mind it felt like it was so much bigger. Maybe just because I watched it so many times.

Other movies I feel like I was shown many times were Dr. Seuss ones (Starbelly Sneetches and Thorax especially) which I remember not understanding. There was also an animated movie about a giant and a child and it's always winter in his garden until he lets the children in (there's freakish people dancing/tapping on his roof--supposed to be rain, snow, lighting, or some such thing)...I recently saw what I thought was this movie but it turned out to be a lame version of it (unless I'm just forgetting how lame it originally was).

Isn't it amazing how rediscovering something (book or movie or toy) from your childhood can stir up such powerful feelings? This has been happening to me more and more now that I have children of my own and am randomly coming across stuff for them that I used to have.