Getting Acquainted With Engineering (Part I) (1950)

★★★★★ · Steve Nordby · 2003-11-25

With all the personality that you would expect from an engineer, the host points out that 4 of 10 boys drop out of engineering in the first year of college. You see, the money and glamour of engineering attracts them, but they can't hack it or aren't really interested. With all these dropouts, national defense is hurt. High school boy Bill takes some tests to define his potential, and in the absolute world of engineers, he gets his life sentence. This film is so bad, badly dated, and sexist that I can't help give it 5 stars. And in 50 years I expect all my reviews to be bad, badly dated, and…

★★★★ · The people with big ears speak. · Spuzz · 2003-09-17

A very strange narrator speaks abotu if you're ready to become an engineer. As dull as it may seem, the film wins total bonus points with the amazing deer in headlights the narrator has throughout the whole movie. From the get go, his actions are stilted, his speech is strange, and just extremely strange. From there, except for the first scenario where a counselor meets with the stupidest student one has seen in a while, the rest is pretty ordinary. But going back to the narrator, some key points to wonder; a) What EXACTLY does the narrator do just before he starts talking at the beginning…

★★ · Engineering was never THIS dreadful · lwilton · 2005-01-19

Even for some of the remarkably badly made educational films of the 1940s and 1950s (which were still shown in the 1960s schools), this one comes close to taking the cake. Through most of early American (and world) history engineers were not particularly important, and there were not many, but enough, kids that actually wanted to be scientists and engineers. That all changed in 1959, when we suddenly decided we had to invent space program in about a month. Everyone in acedemia and the government was doing everything they could think of to produce more engineers. This produced an entire…