Wheels Of Tragedy is a 1963 Scare 'Em Straight driver's education film depicting the tragic outcomes of actual car accidents.
Filmed in cooperation with the Ohio State Patrol, this part documentary/part drama movie focuses on the first day on the job for a young Ohio state trooper, who is riding along with a world-weary officer who has been on the scene of many serious accidents in his time.
Over the course of a 12-hour shift on what is described as a holiday weekend, the two-man team are called to the scene of four serious accidents, each having a different cause. Three of them end with multiple fatalities, the other with severe back injuries that will render him hospitalized for months. Also during the course of the shift, the officers visit a previous accident victim (who was injured two years earlier) and deliver a death notification to a young man's parents.
Major issues include car maintenance, truck driving regulations and (of course) reckless driving disregard for traffic laws.
As with many previous "shock and gore" driver's education films of the era, the point of Wheels Of Tragedy was to stress to teenage drivers that one instance of failing to obey a traffic law, a decision to drive too fast, an instant of carelessness or recklessness can be deadly - and not just in a clean, bloodless death sense. Like the Ohio State Patrol's Signal 30 released four years earlier, actual file footage of accident scenes, along with bodies mangled and bloodied beyond recognition, are used (although the events leading up to these tragedies are dramatized and re-enacted), this possible in an era long before privacy laws (such as HIPAA) were enacted.
Wheels Of Tragedy – along with its predecessor Signal 30 – remained a staple of many driver's education classes during the 1960s through as late as the early 1980s, all to instill safe driving habits in young teenagers who otherwise would be tempted to break every traffic law on the books. Other similar films included Red Asphalt, Mechanized Death, Highways of Agony, Options to Live and many others. All with the same lesson in mind: If you don't follow traffic and safety laws all of the time behind the wheel... well, take a look at what might happen.
Tropes that can result in Wheels Of Tragedy – if you're not careful – include:
- Bloodless Carnage: Forget it if you are watching this film. The first and third accidents include lots of blood, guts and gore.
- Broken Tears: The senior trooper has seen it all, but things really get to him when he carries the dead body of a teen-aged girl from the wreckage of a car (that had plunged into a river), and cries out, "Damn! DAMN!" (And you thought Florida Evans – who uttered those words 13 years later on Good Times – coined the infamous phrase.)
- Dramatization: The stories leading up to the car accidents are re-enactments (and likely somewhat fictionalized, to suggest events that might have happened). The footage that follows each crash is, well, not.
- Screams Like a Little Girl: The man in the second accident scene is in incredible pain after being carried off on a stretcher. (He had been thrown from his car after losing control and going into the ditch. The trooper explains that had the man been wearing a seat belt, he likely would have walked away and not been injured.)
- Teens Are Monsters: The final act with the car going into a river, the young man drives recklessly on a dark, winding road he is unfamiliar with. Rock music is playing on the car radio (another favorite vice of the era to distinguish "bad" teens from those who were far less likely to drive recklessly).
- Trapped in a Sinking Car: The final act, involving three teenagers whose car goes over a closed bridge and plummets into the river below. The driver and his best buddy survive, but the teen-aged girl, well...
