The 5 Most Excessively Creepy Children's Educational Videos

5 One Got Fat

What do you get when you throw a handful of serial killers into an empty room with nothing but a notepad, a bicycle and a pound and a half of mescaline? You get the script for One Got Fat, an educational film from the early '60s counterintuitively not about child obesity, but about bicycle safety.

The video introduces 10 adorable children who are planning an innocent bike ride to the park for a nice, pleasant picnic. Little do they know that death is waiting for them at every corner ...

And little do you know that that's a good thing, because they're actually all terrifying monkey monsters with black holes for eyes:

In downright biblical fashion, each of the monkey-children is stricken dead by fate (fate drives a garbage truck on the weekends to make ends meet).

So what were the children's sins, aside from being born monstrous abominations that should not live? Well, they're all guilty of such egregious crimes against God as forgetting to signal once, riding on the sidewalk and giving their friends a lift when they need it ...

As each of the Lil' Leatherfaces is whisked away by the cold hands of death, the unwaveringly jovial voice of the narrator makes sure that any children watching understand two things:

First: There are some basic rules of the road for cyclists that everybody should follow.

Second: You are naught but animals to adults, and they will not care if you die in terror and pain.

Like this guy, whom the narrator explicitly tells you is "a really nice boy," approximately two seconds before the movie flashes us his gruesome pre-death face and he gets mowed down by an automobile like an unlucky squirrel.

One by one, the monkey-kids are systematically destroyed for their mistakes until there is only a single survivor. This Bicycle Highlander's name is Orville, and it's revealed that not only is he the sole survivor of this harmless bike trip, but he's also the only human being. But instead of mourning his simian friends, he calmly sits down at the park all alone, to eat all of their lunches.

Understand the title now? No?

Here, we'll explain: The "one" refers to Orville, the winner of this interspecies death race, and he "got fat" by seizing the lunches of his fallen friends like trophies and callously devouring them. Or, to put it another way: "To the victor go the spoils."

4 Apaches

Apaches is a surprisingly well-made children's educational video about farm safety. We say "surprisingly well-made," because Apaches actually bothers with real characters with personalities and names, instead of just casting "Generic Child 1" and "The Icy Claws of Death" and calling it a day, like most other British PSAs of the '70s. The film starts off with a roll call, relaying the biographies of all the characters to the viewers, except for the last two boys, Tom and Robert, whose entire back story is "Tom, Robert."

That's called foreshadowing, kids.

The makers of Apaches wanted to warn children of the dangers of farm life, and they did so in direct response to an unusual spike in farm-related child deaths back in 1976. The directors even claimed that the movie's death scenes were based on real fatal children's accidents ... which puts Apaches firmly out of the harmless PSA category and right into snuff film territory. Here, see what we mean:

That's death number one, and while it seems needlessly violent, it has a grim kind of logic. Little girl plays on a truck, little girls shouldn't play on trucks, ergo little girl gets brutally crushed to death by a truck. We're pretty sure that's the "circle of life" thing that Elton John guy keeps singing about.

But that's the last time Apaches follows any kind of reasonable path, because death number two is a peppy young boy drowning in a giant hole full of feces (what's the lesson there, "Watch out for the shit pit?").

The third death is a spunky little girl who just up and drinks poison for fun (that is seriously her chief motivation). Now, it's one thing to sort of hint at the threat of injury lingering around everyday farm life, but this girl accidentally drank a tiny sip of a mystery liquid, and then we cut to 30 seconds of her horrifically screaming for help as she dies in the most intense pain imaginable, every second being relayed to the audience who, remember, are like 7 years old.

Here's another child, this one crushed to death by a falling gate, which we're not even sure he could have prevented. The gate was stacked there against the wall, presumably by adults who knew better, and it was even the other boy who knocked it over. We're not sure what the preventative message here is, aside from "Holy God, never step foot on an English farmstead."

Finally, we find out that even our lead character, the narrator, isn't immune to the Brits' strict death penalty imposed for all Chicanery-Related Offenses:

He played on a tractor -- a tractor that the adults in the film specifically told him it was OK to play on -- and then he died screaming. There's your lesson, kids: The adults not only don't care if you die, they're actively trying to kill you. Which is especially disturbing when you remember what the makers of Apaches said up top: "based on actual children's deaths."

So apparently there was a period in 1976 where child murder via drunken negligence was just the en vogue thing to do in rural England.

But wait, what happened to Tom? We all know Robert died how he lived -- in a giant pool of liquid crap -- but the movie seems to have plain forgotten about Tom. Jesus, if he escaped from this mess alive, we're going to make another official call: He's unbreakable.

Somebody call Sam Jackson and tell him to put his mentor-fro back on.

3 Strong Kids Safe Kids

This 1984 child molestation prevention video starts out with a pretty strong premise: Get the Fonz to talk to kids about inappropriate boning. It seems like a match made in heaven. The Fonz is the absolute king of two things: being a 10-year-old's conception of a "cool guy," and boning things (inappropriately). But even with a solid setup like that, the movie almost immediately goes off the rails when the Fonz starts threatening to cripple children right in the intro:

That's going to be a recurring problem, going forward: Safe Kids has no idea what tone it should take. It's trying to tackle serious subject matter, but kids like silly things, right? So the needle swings wildly between "You're going to get raped" and "Let's sing fun songs!" Perhaps nothing is a better indicator of this issue than the host, a full-grown man who dresses in OshKosh B'Gosh and hangs around playgrounds singing songs about children's genitals while playing a ukulele.

Somewhere around the time he sings "Vulva, is what girls have down below/Vulva, when she's naked it will show!" you have to wonder if you're even seeing the original film as it was shot, or if the guy who lives in your neighbor's basement recorded over portions of the tape.

Later, the movie has to broach the tricky subject of things adults might say to keep a child from telling on them. The best way to do this, of course, is to have a pair of puppets threaten to kill each other in increasingly violent ways with their silly little puppet voices.

It's fine to want to tell children the blunt truth about some awful crap, Safe Kids, but you can't have it both ways: You don't hire a Nazi clown to teach your kids about the Holocaust, and you don't teach a kid about the dangers of child molestation by threatening to rape them with a crocodile puppet.

2 The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water

"I am the spirit of dark and lonely water" is how this PSA starts out. That's called efficiency, ladies and gentlemen. First line, lead character, and only speaking parts? Grim reaper, grim reaper, and grim reaper.

And it is an unbelievably creepy interpretation of the spirit of death, too. His cold, distant, emotionless voice, the tiny hints of glee at the impending deaths of children -- you could easily revamp this into a serious horror film and be praised for your inherent understanding of human mortality. And though it's pretty short, running just shy of 1:30, The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water manages its time like a Swiss watch (that, uh ... that kills children?). Two kids die and a third nearly drowns, all in just under 90 seconds:

Here, for instance: "The boy is showing off," the Spirit says, and that's all the justification it needs to eat his living soul. The living avatar of drowning children then chuckles a little and whispers: "The showoffs are easy."

See, statements like that imply that the so-called "Spirit of Water" isn't punishing kids who transgress somehow, but that it wants to kill all children all the time, not just the misbehaving ones. That takes the message away from "Be careful around water" to something more like "Lakes are genuinely possessed by ghosts that will try to murder you, no matter what." We're not sure what the hydrophobia rate was in England pre-Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, but we're going to guess that it doubled the day after release.

Shit. Tripled.

1 The Finishing Line

The Finishing Line was made as a handy field manual for children to organize their own impromptu Battle Royales using nothing but a crate of short-shorts and an abandoned rail yard. Or else it's an instructional PSA about train safety. It's really not all that clear, to be honest.

The Finish Line takes place entirely within the perverse fantasy of a murderous schoolboy who, apropos of virtually nothing, fantasizes for 20 straight minutes about running death games for his classmates.

The majority of the video traces what specific events his theoretical Slaughterlympics would consist of, and nobody is safe from his wrath: The first event is for kids 9 and under only. It's called Fence Breaking, and the point of the game is to --

Oh, blue team's down already? Geez, we're barely past the premise stage and there are already dead 8-year-olds in this film. And no, don't be fooled by the image: She didn't just fall and get knocked unconscious -- that's not nearly horrific enough. All of those little kids working together were all inexplicably too weak to lift her body, so they had to leave their friend behind while a train came by and nearly cut her in half. But don't worry! It's not like they're going to show you the limp, bloody corpse of a second grad-

Yep. The movie is not only going to "go there," it's going to level the ground and lay a foundation "there," so that its children might live "there" for generations to come.

Here's the next event, Stone Throwing, where the children get two points for a smashed window, four points for a smashed head:

Here's Last Across, which doesn't seem to have any rules or point, really; it's just a mass sacrifice to the hungry Train Lord.

And finally there's the Great Tunnel Walk: 100 kids march dismally into a darkened train tunnel, and the first one to the other side wins. Jesus, the ambiguity there -- as those kids march reluctantly into the impenetrable blackness of the tunnel -- after the vivid violence that came before ... it's actually worse to be left wondering. Will a train come while they're in there? If it does, will any of them make it out alive?

Just kidding!

The Brits aren't crazy about ambiguity.

It says something strange and unsettling that three of the five most fucked up children's movies we could find throughout history were educational videos from Great Britain in the 1970s. Most societies, when given this same prompt, would cut a 30-second PSA with John Stamos telling you that playing with trains is uncool (it messes up your hair, dude). Great Britain pulled "train safety" out of the Lessons for Children hat and proceeded to allot $60,000 for the Blood Budget on their 20-minute pilot for a train-based Hunger Games series.

For more reasons our kids are growing up so screwy, check out 7 Things 'Good Parents' Do (That Screw Up Kids For Life) and The 6 Most Unintentionally Hilarious Old School PSAs.

If you're pressed for time and just looking for a quick fix, then check out The Most Baffling PSA Ever: Vote Like ... Spider-Man?