TVTropes Now available in the app store!
Open

Follow TV Tropes

Instructional Film

Go To

Instructional Film (trope)
This was advice for surviving nukes... and more effective than you might think.

"Attention, all MASH personnel. Tonight's War Department film on how to lead a good, clean life has been cancelled... due to unusually heavy indifference."
M*A*S*H

The user-friendly way to impart information and training and a prime target for parody, the instructional film is a short presentation that has generally been created by a government department or a business to impart training or information on a specific area... cheese making, avoiding nuclear attack, understanding the Dewey decimal system, care and maintenance of the IBM System/360 mainframe... the list is endless.

Because of the need to educate the young and/or presumably ignorant, the intellectual level is often pitched very low indeed, leading to many of these films having a deeply condescending tone. They are also often vehicles for propaganda or contain the unconscious attitudes and biases of their producers.

They are rarely kept updated to current fashions; literal, intellectual, or cultural. Parodies usually have films in the style of filmreels from sometime between the 1930s and 1950s.

A particular target for parody is the specific sub-type, the fast-food training video.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Real Life 
Films — Animation
  • Several Disney short films (Freewayphobia #1, Goofy's Freeway Trouble and Motor Mania) have been shown in driving schools across the U.S. for decades.

Films — Live-Action

Magazines

Radio

  • The Brewing Network's Homebrew U DVD series. Currently only one volume (American Pale Ale), there was an offhand mention in one episode of The Session about shooting for a DVD about pilsner.

Western Animation

  • This was the basic premise of Private Snafu, in a "Don't do what Snafu does" way.

    Played Straight 
Films — Live-Action
  • Tank Girl. When the title character infiltrates Liquid Silver, there's a video that trains new employees in how to dress themselves correctly. Of course, she pays no attention at all to it.
  • We see the new employee orientation video in Waiting..., complete with Description Cuts between how the video says the employees should behave and how we see them actually behaving.

Live-Action TV

  • The Office features a version during their sexual harassment training, but because of the nature of the show, it comes across as almost a parody of the trope. Props to the producers who made it look authentically like a video from the Eighties.

Literature

  • In The Vor Game, following the aftermath of the chemical cleanup incident that ends his tour of duty at Camp Permafrost, Miles Vorkosigan finds himself in quasi-exile assigned to ImpSec Headquarters. As a combination of spiritual exercise and stir-crazyness, he decides to view every training video in the military library in strictly alphabetical order during his off-duty hours. He is bemused at the 30-minute program under "H: Hygiene" which covers how to take a shower — presumably targeted at rural back-country draftees without previous exposure to indoor plumbing. After a month he manages to reach "L: Laser-rifle Model D-67; power-pack circuitry, maintenance, and repair" when the plot advances to the next stage of his adventure.

Radio

  • Our Miss Brooks: In "Audio-Visual Experiment", Miss Brooks rents a filmed version of the poem "Lady of the Lake" to show her class after she's left early for the day. Unfortunately, a disgruntled employee of the educational film company had mixed up films and canisters in revenge. The boys in the class stay late to repeatedly watch "Sirens of the Screen, Past and Present". Later on, Mrs. Davis' lady's aid meeting rents "Shearing Sheep in Big Billibong, Australia" only to have a film with scenes backstage in a women's dressing room. The company tries to rectify the mistake by giving Miss Brooks a film about the workings of the board of education, but end up giving her one all about Las Vegas and gambling.

Theme Parks

Video Games

  • Team Fortress 2: Some of the maps are introduced with a black-and-white instructional film explaining the map's objective and, sometimes, unique elements of its topology.

Webcomics

  • In the Charby the Vampirate side comic Here There Be Monsters Blaine tries to force his hunters to watch a cheesy safety video he made after Victor gets injured on the job, the only hunter paying any attention whatsoever to the film is Mort.

Web Videos

  • The GREYLOCK Tapes: The third video, orientation protocols, is presented as an instructional tape made by Unit 13 to explain to test subjects the concept of tulpas and introduce the machine they will be experimented on, the Thoughtform Manifestor.

Western Animation

    Parodied 
Anime
  • Training with Hinako is an animated fitness video which a girl named Hinako supposed to give the viewers exercise instructions, though its more of an excuse to show a sweaty girl exercising with a "bouncy package".

Fan Works

Films — Animation

  • Hilda and the Mountain King: Mrs. Hallgrim's class is forced to watch a Safety Patrol video about trolls, which is rife with Stylistic Suck (such as the Troll obviously being a human actor in a bad costume), and highly inaccurate as it portrays trolls as man-eating monsters. Frida openly protests the incorrect video and actually finds support among several students.

Films — Live-Action

Literature

  • The first story of Cubnet recounts an employee orientation video for creative staff at the titular network, which is clearly from The '80s at the latest given the fact that it mentions "this new era of cable television" and the network being the first of its kindnote , and it outright encourages the incoming creative staff to make lowest-common-denominator programming to appeal to children and not adults:
    Video narrator: Many acclaimed Saturday morning cartoons were cancelled prematurely because they were drawing the wrong audience, which the toy and junk food companies that sponsored those shows were not happy about.
    Brenda Bear: (thinking to herself) You don't say.
    Video narrator: Make sure our programs are marketable, especially to toy companies, and make sure both kids and parents approve of the content in them. That is the key to success here at Cubnet. Good luck!

Live-Action TV

Tabletop Games

  • Paranoia adventure Vapors Don't Shoot Back. While the Troubleshooters are being transported in the flybot, they're shown an Old Reckoning U.S. Army parachute training film which will hopefully teach them enough to use the parachutes they've been given.

Video Games

  • Fallout:
    • The trailers and intros for the games cheerily promote Vault-Tec bunkers and the Atom Age life, before revealing the post-apocalyptic world it became.
    • Fallout 4 has a series of Vault-Tec pre-War educational films to explain the stats system done in a direct pastiche of Duck and Cover, maintaining the company's positive tone even as it illustrates the horrors of the Wasteland. (Presumably they're not canon, as they show things Vault-Tec didn't predict.)
    • Accompanying the release of the TV series is a series of training videos hosted by Bud Askins, in which he provides guidance for prospective Vault-Tec salesmen, employees and managers, covering their responsibilities, best practices, and career advancement possibilities. It also shows just how unrepentantly sociopathic Vault-Tec can be even to its own staff with a playful smile.
  • Metal Arms: Glitch in the System features a Fifties-style film where the narrator cheerfully details the history of their planet and the Droids rebellion against a tyrannical regime of slavery and genocide.

Web Animation

  • The "Ski Patrol" episode of Happy Tree Friends attempts to teach Lumpy ski lodge safety with near-impossible-to-follow steps that end up killing all of the skiers.

Web Videos

  • StacheBros has "Donkey Kong Presents: How to be Dumb", in which Donkey Kong teaches the audience how to be stupid like him.

Western Animation

  • Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law has an episode which was one long orientation video for Sebben and Sebben.
  • Walt Disney's Goofy starred in a long-running series of instructional video parodies on such subjects as:
  • Kim Possible:
    • Before taking Driver's Education classes, Kim Possible and her classmates watch an instructional video on safe driving that's both remarkably out of date (mentioning sock-hops and soda bars) and incredibly gory and graphic (judging by their reactions) in depicting the consequences of a crash.
    • Re-education sessions in the "A Sitch in Time" Bad Future begin with a short instructional/propaganda film clip of The Supreme One (future Shego) describing how she took over the world.
  • The first episode of Monsters at Work has Tylor watching a Monsters, Inc. orientation video on his first day at work. But because he came in just after the company switched from scream to laugh energy, the resources head has to repeatedly pause the now-outdated video and state the company's new direction.
    Announcer: This is Monsters Incorporated, where we scare because we care.
    Mr. Crummyham: A-Actually, we don't scare anymore! Now, we're laugh power! Sorry about that.
    Announcer: Every day on each of our state-of-the-art Scare Floors...
    Mr. Crummyham: Laugh Floors!
    Announcer: ...our elite team of Scarers...
    Mr. Crummyham: Jokesters!
    Announcer: ...help support the mission of our esteemed CEO.
    Mr. Crummyham: No longer esteemed! Kccch! Headed off to the big house!
  • The Simpsons:
    • A Running Gag is Springfield Elementary's use of instructional films that are no longer fit for purpose, if they ever were. Problems range from casual depiction of attempted suicide, videos about space travel that were poorly researched even for the 50's and transparent meat lobby propaganda that shows a bit too much detail on how slaughterhouses work.
    • Doctor Hibbert shows Lisa a film on DNA (starring, of course, Troy Mcclure) that starts with Troy taking off his protective equipment in a lab (with the lab workers running like hell) and ends with Troy looking blankly at the camera when asked what DNA stands for.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants: The episode "Krusty Krab Training Video" is a satire of these.
  • Star Trek: Prodigy: When Dal R'El is sent to work in the deep crevasses of the asteroid penal colony, the elevator ride includes an instructional safety video using cartoonish illustrations (because the Universal Translator is banned) to highlight the many dangers (illustrated with big red Xs) and some of the ways to avoid them (such as the "buddy system" ankle tethers). The video is hilarious as only a safety briefing can be, especially given how cheerful it seems to be in comparison to everything else there. Later on when Dal is in imminent danger of being crushed by a cave-in, he screams "X! X!"

 
Feedback

Video Example(s):

Top

Race Training

When you enter your first race event in Burnout 3, you watch a short tutorial video outlining what you need to do to get ahead the game, featuring clips of the gameplay, all narrated by DJ Stryker who runs Crash FM.

How well does it match the trope?

4.8 (5 votes)

Example of:

Main / InstructionalFilm

Media sources:

Report