The very awkward dinner party

These videos really are very cleverly done (and I think we can say from the evidence of this one that they were definitely *not* aimed at schoolchildren, with the humour here coming from the acute social embarrassment of our thirty-ish protagonist who is getting involved with a single mother while living under the thumb of his own masterful Mama!) The challenge is to incorporate the necessary amount of repetition and simplification without producing a tediously stilted result, and without giving the impression of talking down to the audience, whose social sophistication is literally years ahead of their primary-age comprehension level. Basically the audiovisual equivalent of the books written to attract struggling older children into reading (now dubbed high-low books: "age-appropriate subject matter at a low reading level").

Watch on YouTube

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After watching a few of these I was presented by YouTube with another series from the same era ("Let's get to know one another" from 1981), but that one -- somewhat to my relief, since I wasn't able to track down a playlist of the entire series, but only a couple of random episodes -- really is beneath my level, although it's also cleverly done and quite funny. ( Read more... )