Dating Do's and Don'ts (1949)
Teenager Woody wins tickets to the carnival and works through the etiquette of asking a girl out, choosing where to go, and behaving properly on the date itself, culminating in a successful, well-mannered evening with a girl named Anne.
Directed by Gilbert Altschul for Coronet Instructional Films with input from family-life researcher Reuben Hill, Dating Do’s and Don’ts codifies rigid, gendered courtship roles — boy as sole initiator, parents as supervisors — that make it a frequently cited example of how mid-century classroom films naturalized their era’s social conventions as universal rules.
Background
Produced for Coronet Instructional Films, directed by Gilbert Altschul with Ted Peshak, written by George Tychsen, and developed with input from family-life researcher Reuben Hill of the University of North Carolina, Dating Do’s and Don’ts follows a teenager named Woody, who wins tickets to his school’s carnival and has to decide whom to ask, what to say, and how to behave once the date begins. He settles on classmate Ann Davis, and the film walks through the agreed-upon script of mid-century teenage courtship — the boy proposes the date, plans it, pays for it, and keeps the evening moving — ending with a successful, well-mannered night out.
What to watch for
Notice how rigidly the film assigns roles: Woody must do all the inviting and planning, while Ann’s part is simply to be agreeable, a division of labor the narration presents as self-evidently correct rather than as one era’s particular convention. Coronet produced dozens of these classroom guidance shorts through the 1940s and 1950s, and this one is revived today largely because its advice now reads as a time capsule of vanished assumptions about gender and teenage behavior. Set against the more punitive youth-safety shorts Coronet and its competitors released in the same years, its tidy, risk-free carnival date is a useful index of what counted as both the right and the wrong way to come of age.
