Sunday, March 29, 2009

New Zealand Road Safety 1950s Style - Don't Monkey Around...

From a much different time when children actually rode bicycles to school rather than be chauffeured by parents and when bike safety inspections were the order of the day in schools, comes a Monkey Tale (1952) filmed by the National Film Unit for the Ministry of Transport, starring Show Off Charlie.

View here. Courtesy of NZ On Screen.

What an utter Charlie.

Today, with the road safety problem long since resolved, Charlie would be.... well, a boy racer.

5 comments:

Jayne said...

Loved the film.
Re: double-banking we call it "dinking" in Oz ( well, we did when kids actually rode push bikes to school).

kuaka said...

we used to call it dubbing in Christchurch a couple of decades later, so double-banking may be a 50s or North Island thing!

Jayne said...

Hubby just watched it, loved it, too lol.
One thing we noticed - we've never seen the hand signal for stopping before!

kuaka said...

The stopping hand signal was drilled into us in primary school.

Have you ever seen the turning left hand signal from inside a car - window down, arm outside vertical with hand slightly above roof pointing left. At this stage, driver has lost all concentration & control, ploughed across intersection into a hedge or shop frontage...

p.s. i realized that "dubbing" is shortened slang for double-banking. Or maybe because of the Kiwi mumble, it was an indistinct utterance of double-banking.

Jayne said...

LOL
Yes, I've seen the left hand turn signal from inside a car who's indicators have suddenly given up the ghost ;)
Ahhh, ok on the dubbing/double-banking.