Years ago, Monlux Elementary School would gather all the students for "assemblies" in the auditorium where they would screen educational films on the movie projector. When I was in second or third grade, they showed us a film on bicycle safety that brought me years and years of horrifying nightmares. I remember not being able to sleep well for weeks, and for years after would periodically get a flashback of a scene or two. When I tried to describe this film to friends years later ("monkeys on bikes" was the best description I could muster), no one I knew had ever heard of it and thought it was a figment of my imagination. Well, a few weeks ago at the ripe age of 35 I got another of those aforementioned flashbacks and decided to Google "monkeys on bikes." To my surprise I found the film - called "One Got Fat." With a creepy voiceover by "Fractured Fairytales" Edward Everett Horton, it is the terrifying story of a bunch of half monkey/half teenage kids not obeying bicycle safety laws and meeting horrible fates. Since rediscovering this film, I've periodically watched it as a sort of therapy for the second grader inside me. Its still weird.
http://www.archive.org/details/OneGotFa1963
1 comment:
I was also haunted by this for so many years, and would have bad dreams and flashbacks well into adulthood. I saw it around 1972 and then again about two years later. FUnny thing, i really remember it with real chimps, and not kids. Funny how time 8and dreams) change ones perception. A real strange film and unintentionally surreal.
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