Live and Learn

This early Sid Davis film -- distributed, for some reason, by the Encyclopedia Britannica -- is a series of warnings about how easy it is for children to kill themselves with matches, by jumping off buildings, by canoing on a lake, or putting out an eye with a gun -- when I was a kid, wearing an eye patch like the Hathaway Man would have been considered cool. Nowadays, of course, there are hundreds of thousands of Youtube videos showing people doing idiotic things and getting into trouble, and Comedy Central's TOSH.0 features these with snarky comments. The gentle, amused voice of the narrator is in odd contrast to the voice of my mother in my head -- and probably in yours -- constantly warning me that you could put out an eye with that; pillow fights were particularly dangerous.

The whole thing is pitched in such a way that I don't think it stopped a single boy from hurting himself.