Inside Magoo (1960): Comedic Commentary on 1950s America and Cancer

Author(s):  
David Cantor

This chapter traces the role of humour in Inside Magoo (1960), an educational film released by United Productions of America (UPA) for the American Cancer Society (ACS). Humour, I suggest, provided 1) a response to ACS’s concerns that public fears of cancer led people to avoid appropriate medical help, and 2) a commentary on 1950s America from the perspective of someone – Mr. Magoo – who rejected the post-war world of white, male, middle-class, consumerist suburbia. This film was thus not only about cancer. It wrapped the ACS message within humorous observations on life in the 1950s to charm audiences into adopting ACS approaches to the disease; a technique, I suggest, that was common to other UPA cancer educationals of the 1950s.

Author(s):  
Vasinskaya Mariia ◽  

Palace and garden complexes located at suburbs of Leningrad (Leningrad Oblast, the USSR) rapidly reconstructed after ruinous German occupation during the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 became popular places for open air celebrations among Soviet citizens. The author outlines historic specifics of open air celebrations considered as a form of organization of leisure time, topics and content of cultural programs, analyses an evolution of forms of museum communication with visitors in early post-war time drawing on the example of Pavlovsk of the 1950s. The article gives the author's view on a role of integration historical and cultural resources (including monuments of architecture and decorative art) into the context of solution of personal growth, educational, recreational tasks of Soviet social pedagogics, measures aimed at state support to domestic tourism sector.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Wells

Following on from John Osborne’s infamous play Look Back in Anger of 1956, London’s stage saw the emergence of the ‘Angry Young Man’, realistic portrayals of working-class men in a difficult age. Expresso Bongo and Lily White Boys, works of the mid-to-late 1950s, demonstrate that the angry young man was also present in London’s musicals, previously an upper- and middle-class genre. Featuring the Soho district, gangsters, prostitutes and rock music, this unique era of musical theatre changed expectations of what musical theatre could and would offer to a jaded urban audience. These astonishing musical theatre works offer potent commentary on British society, British identity and particularly disenfranchised young British men, and offer insights into American and British relations, gender roles and expectations, and the complicated role of working-class men in the new Elizabethan era.


2000 ◽  
pp. 796-797
Author(s):  
D. G. Bal ◽  
J. Cook ◽  
R. Todd ◽  
M. Morra ◽  
N. Lins ◽  
...  

2004 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN WELSHMAN

Recent writing in social policy on the role of agency has made important assumptions about social administration in the post-war period. In particular it is suggested that interpretations of the causes of poverty, and the thinking of Richard Titmuss, were characterised by a ‘denial’ of agency and almost total emphasis on structural factors. The implications were that this left the Titmuss paradigm vulnerable to more individualistic interpretations in the 1980s. In this article we look more closely at Titmuss's work and thought in the three decades of the 1940s, the 1950s, and the 1960s, aiming to produce a fuller and more nuanced analysis. We argue that the distinctive position adopted by Titmuss was in large part his response to earlier and on-going debates about social pathology. What he was trying to do was to make others aware of the broader context in which behaviour had to be analysed. But Titmuss himself became constrained by the paradigm that he did more than anyone else to create. Thus debates about behaviour, structure, and poverty have been marked as much by continuity as by change.


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