Flutterby™! : Sock Hops, Poodle Skirts, and Climate Change Awareness

The Decade of Sock Hops, Poodle Skirts, and Climate Change Awareness

As new and challenging as these ideas were, sincere attempts were made to introduce them to the mainstream. It may come as a surprise today, but in 1958, the potential for CO₂-driven climate disruption was part of the public school curriculum. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the director Frank Capra (It’s a Wonderful Life, etc.) collaborated with Bell Telephone (AT&T) on a series of educational films that were aired on national television and distributed widely through American schools. Using a hybrid of animation and live action popular at the time, 1958’s The Unchained Goddess featured Meteora, an animated Rita Hayworth–like weather deity who becomes infatuated with the domed and bespectacled Dr. Frank Baxter, a legendary (real-life) professor at the University of Southern California. Over the course of the film, Baxter, a truly delightful man, explains the science and mechanics of weather, finishing up with a warning that “man may be unwittingly changing the world’s climate through the waste products of his civilization … ” As Baxter paraphrases Gilbert Plass’s research and Roger Revelle’s lyricism, we see dramatic footage of collapsing glaciers juxtaposed with fuming smokestacks, bumper-to-bumper traffic, and animations of rising seas inundating the coastal United States. The Unchained Goddess, financed and distributed by one of the biggest and most powerful corporations in US history, was seen by tens of millions of young baby boomers.

All overridden by concerted marketing campaigns from the fossil fuel providers, of course.

Via Sensible Endowment