Martin Tahse And The Birth Of The After-School Special-Kevin Flanagan
Martin Tahse and the Birth of the After School Special
By Kevin Flanagan
As America’s children grew up and America’s mothers left home and joined America’s fathers in the workplace, television became a primary care-giver during the after school hours. By the 1970s, many households avoided falling into the “mother at home with the kids” dichotomy. “Latch-key” adolescents surely relished a certain amount of self-sufficiency and relied on broadcast T.V. to pass the empty hours until dinner and the promise of having to do homework. Teens learned all day, but “after school specials” saw that they continued that learning throughout the afternoon.
One stalwart producer of short films for nascent after school audiences was Martin Tahse, a relatively unknown impresario of this often neglected genre. Tahse started producing after school specials in the 1970s and continued through the 1980s. His films have started to see DVD distribution in recent years and those interested in witnessing the birth of what was a new (and to our contemporary eyes, aberrant) cycle of films should start with Martin Tahse’s After School Specials: 1974-1976 (Brentwood/BCI, 2004), a budget-priced collection—and the first in a series—which will eventually come to be seen as the last word on vintage after school material.
The SCTV tribute was all fun and games, until someone got very seriously hurt.
So, just what is an “after school special?” Generally, the label is applied to an historically and economically motivated series of films beginning in the 1970s which catered to teen and other youth audiences. The films were screened in the afternoon hours (thus the name, though they could be re-screened at other times) and were usually constructed with a certain moral forthrightness in mind. It is fair to say, without oversimplification, that the after school special primarily worked as a place where melodrama and realistic situations met and were generally resolved through a didactic, painfully obvious working-through of the problem at hand. For the target audience, after school specials were engaging, noble fables that dealt with issues by employing a surprising frankness. To parents, the specials were wholesome and cautionary. Viewed from the comfortable rocking chair of the present, these films are historical oddities of interest as a candid window on the 1970s.
The after school special is somewhere between the feature film and the ephemeral short. As compared to much television of the era, the after school special could boast competent production values, was generally shot on film (as opposed to grainy, cheap video) and was generally adapted from a literary source. Viewed as a whole, the after school special cycle was a wellspring for getting recent young adult fiction onto the screen. One would be hard pressed to find another venue constantly willing to adapt contemporary young adult fiction of such varying types. Despite these badges of honor, the after school cycle is almost equally like the ephemeral film genres of the same era (industrial, training, and educational) in its built-in obsolescence. While the stories still bring some referential wisdom to bear on our contemporary audiences, the movies feel very much “of the moment” and do not generally seem to have been made with posterity in mind.
Martin Tahse’s After School Specials: 1974-1976 contains four films of varying degrees of weirdness. The 18th Emergency (1974), a film about bullying, is in some ways the most experimental despite its subservience to resolving the issue of approaching one’s fear. Benji “Mouse” Fowley (Christian Juttner) is a mouthy and meek kid with a tendency to get punched, beaten, and bruised. After publicly comparing bully Marv Hammerman (Jim Sage, depicting a roughneck who could easily serve as a sidekick to Fred “The Hammer” Williamson) to a Neanderthal, Mouse starts avoiding the big guy and proceeds to tell friend Ezzie (Lance Kerwin) of his past mistakes in pissing people off. Will Mouse face his fears? Though generally mainstream in its awkward acting and moralizing, The 18th Emergency shows an experimental side. Combining sketchily animated segments—material not unlike some moments in School House Rock—with the episodic bits makes for a jarring tale. In sum, The 18th Emergency is an idiosyncratic yarn (take, for instance, Mouse’s compulsive tendency to write on all available surfaces with chalk) that otherwise feels a whole lot like other after school specials of the same vintage.
The Summer of the Swans is a relatively straightforward tale of a grumpy teenager named Sara (Heather Totten) and her realizations of not taking people for granted. Sara feels responsible when brother Charlie leaves home in the middle of the night and steals away to a nearby lake in search of the nesting swans. After a bit of a panic attack, Sara comes to appreciate the help of her friends, the gestures of others, and even gets a first date out of the deal. The Summer of the Swans is quaint and utterly unremarkable, though Chris Knight of Brady Bunch fame is in the mix.
In contrast, The Skating Rink is just plain weird. Tuck Farraday (Stewart Petersen) lives on a farm in the semi-rural South and mainly keeps to himself because of a severe stutter. After some trials and tribulations, he makes friends with the retired ice skater who just so happens to be constructing a new skate facility down the street. Tuck begins taking lessons and is soon shown to be a natural. Tuck sticks with the sport and surprises family and peers when he opens the arena skating alongside the owner’s professional wife! Though a nice story of overcoming fear, the film is incredibly, well, incredulous…how often do skating rinks spontaneously open in obscure parts of the South? How did this film secure the services of Rance Howard (who plays Tuck’s father)?
Tahse and company tackle yellow journalism, hearsay, and bad advice in Dear Lovey Hart: I am Desperate. Oddly bubbly Sophomore Carrie (Susan Lawrence) is offered a chance at instant readership in the form of an advice column in her school newspaper.
Giving in to the giddiness (as we all have) of being a teenage girl in the early 1970’s.
The catch? In order to keep things interesting and keep her safe, she has to remain anonymous. To make things more difficult, Carrie’s father (Del Hinkley) is an administrator at the school and constantly voices his reservations about the column. This world of advice for the lovelorn does come tumbling down, but as with all of the shows in this set, some good does shine through.
Martin Tahse’s After School Specials: 1974-1976 is a good introduction to and primer on the sappy, strange, and sometimes compelling world of after school specials. Though not to all tastes, these films are a great way to experience some forgotten aspects of 1970s youth culture.
Copyright C. 2008 Kevin Flanagan