Control Your Emotions
About Control Your Emotions
An unnamed man in a lab coat tells a classroom that emotions work like fire: useful once they are controlled, destructive when they are not. He sets out blocks labeled rage, fear, and love, and covers them with a disk labeled personality. Between the lectures, high-school student Jeff Moore loses his temper. The film walks through a stimulus and a response, then shows Jeff joining the others at a marshmallow roast once he has held the feeling back.
Cast & crew
More about Control Your Emotions
Ted Peshak directed this Coronet classroom short, released in 1950. Black and white, with sound. ACMI times a 16mm print at 12 minutes and 48 seconds. A public copy runs 13 minutes and 18 seconds. The host is not named and is not given a credential beyond the coat and the desk.
Themes
Background
It belongs to the social-guidance shorts Coronet and similar companies sold to American schools around 1950, aimed at teenagers and built on a stimulus-response lesson.
Making
Coronet made it for school projection, with a lecturer breaking into a short story about one student.
Preservation
Prints survive. Prelinger Archives placed a copy on the Internet Archive as public domain. ACMI holds a 16mm access print.
Notes
- The spoken comparison is that fire was an enemy until people learned to use it, and that emotions work the same way.
- One line says that if the behavior is repeated it might leave a permanently warped personality. Another says severe emotional stress often decreases efficiency.
- The only behavior acted out for Jeff is losing his temper. The roast is the corrected ending.
Scenes
- The lecturer stacks blocks marked rage, fear, and love under a disk marked personality.
- Jeff's temper is stopped by the lecture and replayed as a response he could have changed.
- He joins the group at the marshmallow roast.
Also available
- Internet Archive (ControlY1950)
- Wikimedia Commons (Control Your Emotions (1950).webm)
Quotes
Before man learned how to control fire and put it to work, it was man's greatest enemy.
