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Educational Short

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Educational shorts are short stand-alone programs designed to convey a moral about something within the space of a standard commercial break. Often shown at the tail-end of American Saturday-Morning Cartoon shows, or during the commercial breaks in-between shows.

The television versions were first created as a form of commercial during the early days of TV, where commercials actually tried to inform the viewing audience of the uses of a product, instead of simply making the product attractive through glitz and glamour.

Another form of educational short is the short film produced for classroom instruction, typically on some topic related to science or health, or possibly driver's ed. Another ripe subject for parody, or used to characterize teachers as disengaged.

This kind of Non-Fiction might make liberal use of Excuse Plots in an attempt to deliver their lessons in a more interesting way.

Sister Trope of Educational Song (a song that teaches you something) and Edutainment Show. Related to Public Service Announcement (government-sponsored commercial that promotes healthy behavior or addresses a controversial topic) and Scare 'Em Straight (using fictional works to scare people, usually children, from engaging in incompetent and/or immoral behavior). Contrast Documentary (non-fiction that provides a factual report on a topic).

See also And Knowing Is Half the Battle (the characters teach the audience something during The Tag), Anvilicious (the Aesop is delivered with the subtlety of an anvil to the head), and An Aesop (the term for the moral the story is trying to convey).


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 
  • Moyashimon: The "Microbe Deluxe Theatre" shorts that air at the end of some episodes are about what the microbes presented in the show are useful for (which expands the brief flavor texts found in the show proper). Aspergillus oryzae, for example, is an ingredient on several Japanese cuisine dishes such as miso soup, soy sauce, and sake.

    Fan Works 
Crossovers
  • Pokémon: Remix Hearts: Kajun hosts a short informative "video" about Pokémon at the end of nearly every chapter alongside Hikari and later Koko.

    Films — Animation 
  • "The Story of Menstruation": It explains how the menstrual cycle works and how a maturing young woman can deal with it. The short was shown to schoolgirls in American classrooms for decades.
  • Your Friend the Rat: It's a quasi-educational short about the history of rats and their coexistence with humans. We say quasi because, despite it getting its facts right, one of the hosts keeps getting side-tracked and the tone is very much tongue-in-cheek.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • A Case of Spring Fever illustrates the many objects that use springs and are vital to everyday life by means of an Excuse Plot. Coily the Spring Sprite grants a man his wish to "never see a spring in his life". The resulting world can't quite function.
  • LSD: You Decide: Pop singer Tommy Roe discusses that while drugs like LSD might make you temporarily more perceptive, it's a short-term gain with dreadful long-term consequences.
  • Mom and Dad (1945):
    • The interpolated short film about menstruation and childbirth is actually a pretty legit documentary of the menstrual cycle, fertilization, fetal development, and childbirth.
    • The mini-film about the physical effects of syphilis is more obviously an excuse to use Body Horror to shock the audience.
  • Threads: The children of a post-nuclear war Britain are educated in the English language by a scratchy pre-war video titled "Short Words and Pictures", in a classroom run by an elderly apathetic teacher. The children only speak a simplified form of English anyway, further demonstrating the decline of civilization let alone educational standards.
  • "X" Marks the Spot is a short film meant to educate people in the 1940s about the dangers of reckless and inconsiderate driving habits.

    Literature 

    Live-Action TV 

By Creator:

By Work:

  • Daybreak (2019): The Game Overs are forced to watch some very disturbingly graphic educational shorts as a sort of Reel Torture to make them give up the traitor in their ranks.
  • Inspector Rex:
    • "Rispettando le regole si vive meglio": Monterosso is with his niece and Rex, teaching her that the rules are to be respected. A man doing graffiti on a wall and a bicycle rider who does not respect the semaphore are seen. Monte himself throws the cover of a candy in the floor, to which Rex and Monte's niece call Monte to pick it up.
    • "Fai goal al bullismo": A boy plays soccer with Rex. When the latter goes to retrieve the ball, a teenager takes the boy's hat and grabs him by his shirt. It's supposed to be a short against bullying.
  • Look Around You: Series 1 parodies the genre of classroom educational shorts. The format is just as serious as regular edu shorts, however, reality in-universe doesn't quite work as it does here, so any science lesson falls flat or gets contradicted in a bizarre way soon enough.
  • Mystery Science Theater 3000:
    • "Time of the Apes": Servo narrates a short titled "Why Doesn't Johnny Care" that teaches precisely that as a parody of edu shorts.
    • "Hobgoblins": Subverted in the second segment. The mini-film Let's Talk Women is created with the intention of clearing up female misconceptions so women can be treated with respect. It's shot in black and white with magazine-cutout props and Crow doing his best overly cheerful '50s narrator voice. It soon turns into a paranormal documentary about whether or not women are even real, instead.

    Video Games 
  • Control (2019):
    • Most of the projectors throughout the building are playing the many short films the FBC had disseminated to staff to inform them about the various Altered World Events, Altered Items, Objects of Power, Places of Power, and other paranatural subjects the Bureau deals with on a daily basis — some of which might be running loose and wreaking havoc in the Oldest House on any given day, up to and including the Oldest House itself. You never see Darling in person; Jesse only sees him in the form of these films and one brief Hotline call.
    • Threshold Kids is an extremely low-budget edutainment puppet show put together by members of the Federal Bureau of Control in order to teach the children that they've taken away (specifically Dylan) about the paranormal

    Web Video 
  • sillypplproductions2: The Martin Luther King Day episode from 2013 is more educational than silly. It's an abridged history of the fight for black rights, focused primarily on the aforementioned activist.

    Western Animation 

By Creator:

  • When Disney bought ABC and reformatted its Saturday morning lineup, it included a whole slew of these, including How Things Work starring The Lion King's Timon and Pumbaa, and Great Minds Think For Themselves, with Genie from Aladdin. Most of the shorts were gone after two seasons.

By Work:

  • Animaniacs (2020): In "The Warner's Vault", the Warners revisit some of their old footage and find their 1972 "Wipe Those Feet" short about, well, making sure you wipe your feet on the mat when entering a room. Which is all the more relevant because they are creatures that resemble dogs.
  • Futurama: In "I Dated a Robot", Fry is shown an educational short on why dating robots is wrong. It explains that all of humanity's endeavors—such as war, art, theatre, and unexpectedly politics and science—have the underlying purpose of impressing the opposite/same sex for romance (and sex) purposes. And that's good, or else society would collapse.
  • G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero: There were "Knowledge is Power" blurbs that aired at the end of each episode, after the teaser but before the credits. In each one, two kids are going to do something, but a member of the GI Joe team stops them and moralizes about why what they're doing is wrong, ending with the phrase "And Knowing Is Half the Battle". Cheesy doesn't describe them...enough. These blurbs were sometimes shown as stand-alone shorts, hence their inclusion in this part of the Wiki.
  • KaBlam!: In "Stewy the Dog Boy", Stewy's class is shown a stereotypical educational classroom film in homeroom. All of the kids are bored out of their skulls watching it.
  • Schoolhouse Rock!: It's the Ur-Example. Composed entirely of educational songs about basic learning concepts, it was aired amidst Saturday Morning Kids Shows. It became popular enough that the entire series is available in a 2-DVD boxed set.
  • The Simpsons: Memorably parodied in "Bart the Lover". Mrs. Krabappel shows the class a film about "A World Without Zinc". It is of course a terrifying dystopia.
  • Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog: A short segment called "Sonic Says" is featured at the end of episodes where Sonic gives advice and teaches morals to the audience.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants: The 'Education Television' Mrs. Puff makes SpongeBob watch in "No Free Rides" is implied to be so cringe-worthy that it prompts him to loosen his grip on the steering wheel.
  • Superfriends: The second season features small shorts in-between episodes that featured the Superfriends giving kids advice on how to be safe.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987): The fourth season introduces short segments called "Turtle Tips" which usually dealt with environmental issues.

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