Are You Popular? (1947)
Contrasts two teenage girls, including one named Caroline Ames, whose differing manners and social choices win or cost them popularity with classmates, dramatizing for Coronet's classroom audiences the behaviors that make a teenager well-liked.
One of Coronet Instructional Films’ most widely circulated classroom shorts, Are You Popular? distilled 1940s conformity into a lesson about likability, and later became a staple reference in academic surveys of the postwar “social guidance” genre for how bluntly it moralized ordinary teenage behavior.
Background
Are You Popular? was produced by Coronet Instructional Films and directed by Ted Peshak, with cinematography by Bill Rockar and a script by Robert Chapin and Patricia Kealy. Within ten classroom minutes, it follows two teenage girls, including one named Caroline Ames, whose contrasting manners and choices around dating, phone etiquette, and loyalty to friends determine how well-liked they become among their classmates. It was one of Coronet’s most widely circulated social-guidance shorts, part of a genre of postwar classroom films that used dramatized peer pressure to teach conformity to prevailing norms around dating and courtship rather than any academic subject.
What to watch for
The film packs in telephone manners, the etiquette of being asked out versus asking, warnings about going steady, cliques and in-groups, and personal hygiene, all inside its ten minutes, a striking amount of normative instruction compressed into a single dramatized school day. Caroline’s missteps are treated as moral failings rather than simple missteps, a framing that later academic surveys of the social-guidance genre have cited as a particularly blunt example of how these films moralized ordinary teenage behavior. Its earnestness, rather than any particular gag, is what has kept it in circulation as a touchstone of the genre.
