Encyclopædia Britannica Films
In November 1928, John Otterson of Electrical Research Products Inc. decided to make use of the latest sound technology in 35mm motion pictures and apply it to the 16mm format that was gradually being adopted by colleges and schools with easier-to-use projectors.
Under Arnspiger, a special team of experts was assembled, among them researchers Howard Gay, Max Brunstetter and Miss Laura Kreiger, along with Dr. Melvin Brodshaug from Columbia University who would stay with the company for over two decades.
Dr. Carey Croneis supervised some geology subjects and also worked on the science pavilion at the Century of Progress fair of 1933–34, which (in turn) inspired another newcomer, Edward Shumaker, to join the company and fine-tune the title logos.
Its widespread appeal was partly due to narrator James Brill ending with a question directed towards the kindergarten and first grade students watching, one that was repeated by their teachers: "And now Bunny is once more with his mother.
More exotic was Attilio Gatti's filming of the "Dark Continent" in Pygmies of Africa and Amos Burg's portrait of People of Western China shortly before the Japanese invasion.
John Walker got his start with 1938's Navajo Indians and remained a prolific producer through the early 1970s, with a particular emphasis in his later decades with animal subjects and a late 1960 "Problems of Conservation" series.
Back in 1932, heads Devereaux and Arnspiger had established a very close relationship with Beardsley Ruml and Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago, providing the films the extra prestige of scholarly credits.
After an attempt to get the Rockefeller Foundation to purchase ERPI, Benton made another unsuccessful effort with Henry Luce of Life (although the magazine giant initially saw little future in educational films, Time-Life would belatedly enter the market in the 1960s).
Over a lunch meeting held December 9, 1941, Benton managed to persuade Wood to donate Sears' profitable, but aging, subsidiary Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. to the University of Chicago outright as a tax write-off.
After expanding the facilities with $1.5 million invested, William Benton temporarily left to become Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs under President Harry Truman, then as a senator and arch adversary of Joseph McCarthy before returning in 1952.
While this occasionally made them seem a bit static and lecture-like, it also prevented them from aging fast on account of changing musical tastes (a problem with rival educational films of the period).
Passionate about social rights, Barnes once personally protested the censorship of his biography Sir Francis Drake: The Rise of England Sea Power (featuring an interracial friendship) in Georgia schools.
[16] Adding to the fortunes of the educational film industry in general was the Cold War panic imposed by the Soviet launching of Sputnik, which prompted the U.S. government to spend more federal money on America's schools in an effort to keep the nation in fierce competition.
In 1958, Mitchell held a special meeting in Washington, D.C., with the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Affairs to include motion pictures and other visual media in federal budgets.
William Benton also campaigned passionately enough and helped get FCC chairman Newt Minnow, Anna Rosenberg Hoffman and Adlai Stevenson II to pressure Congress to pass the National Defense Education Act.
In addition to many artistic subjects and some of the best school films covering The Renaissance: Its Beginnings, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, he also spearheaded a "Humanities" series sponsored in part by the Ford Foundation (which had previously backed an equally ambitious, but less successful financially, Physics: The Complete Introductory Course that was co-scripted by future president Warren Everote).
His coverage of Thorton Wilder's Our Town, Charles Dickens and Plato's Apology, the Life and Teachings of Socrates were all typical of Barnes' knack for making classics more entertaining to middle and high schools.
Mitchell himself accepted a chancellor job with the University of Denver that summer and was replaced by the more disciplined (keeping films under budget) Warren Everote, a veteran at EB since 1946 and previously president for a short period earlier that decade.
Among his most famous in-depth looks of everyday life overseas were a series on Japan, Hungary and Communism and a trio shot on Samuel Bronston's sets of Fall of the Roman Empire, including Claudius: Boy of Ancient Rome.
A Bill of Rights series both dramatized and explained major legal battles that school students often take for granted (examples include Freedom to Speak, People of New York Vs. Irving Feiner and Free Press Vs. Fair Trial By Jury- the Sheppard Case, latter produced by Stanley Croner).
John Barnes, who also contributed to some of these, tackled Shaw vs. Shakespeare on the historical accuracy and personality of Julius Caesar; this was filmed in 1969 with the cast and sets of a failed British play Her First Roman.
In addition, throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, were a wide assortment of full color biology films covering everything from protozoa to hummingbirds to veracious army ants on the hunt; many of these were produced by John Walker and Bert Van Bork.
The impact of the sexual revolution on teenagers opened the market for provocative subjects like Venereal Disease: The Hidden Epidemic, another Smith production and among the earliest to advocate condom use.
The gradual decline of the films' market was not noticed at first since virtually every public school system was well stocked with 16mm projectors and both EB and its rivals (Coronet, Time-Life, Learning Corporation of America and others all in fierce competition) were busy keeping up with the demand.
Although the federal government had gradually been decreasing the amount spent on education when Carter was president, it was the mid and late eighties that saw the most rapid decline as the Cold War drew to a close and the Soviet Union was no longer a threat.
Thomas G. Smith capped off a long career with EB with the 1976–77 production of The Solar System with special computer generated effects not unlike those being used in the early Star Wars films.
The star director, John Barnes, particularly did not get along well with Wagner and left soon after completing one of his most popular films, a glossy adaptation of Walter van Tilburg Clark's apocalyptic sci fi tale told in flashbacks, The Portable Phonograph.
Particularly popular throughout the eighties was Bruce Hoffman's cluster of "inside the human body" titles that benefited greatly from the ever advancing developments in microphotography combined with expert animation by David Alexovich.
Longtime vice president assistant Philip Stockton remained as vice president of film/video production under Elliott until 1994 (being succeeded by William Bowe) and kept an ongoing, if declining, annual output that included a multi-part short subject series Science Essentials (written by Gary W. Lopez, a few produced by Stockton and many featuring animation by Steve Boyer), Viruses: What They Are And How They Work (a latter day production from veteran Bert Van Bork, written by Gary Lopez, with animation by Bill Gudmundson), 'Problems of Conversation Series' (written and produced by Gary Lopez), Judith Conaway's For Your Baby (which continued a tradition going back the early ERPI era with Arnold Gesell), David Wood and Scott Shearer's Mathsense series and, co-produced with York Films, A Galactic Encyclopedia[citation needed] The shrinking market for educational media eventually hit the company hard and production came to a halt in 1995.
In recent years, the higher-than-average quality of EB films have enjoyed renewed interest as some titles gradually fell into public domain and are easily viewed on YouTube and the Internet Archive.
