What to Do on a Date (1950)
Nick works up the courage to ask classmate Kay to the movies, only to find she's already seen the film; the two improvise instead with a high school scavenger sale, miniature golf, and a weenie roast, modeling inexpensive alternatives to costly commercial entertainment.
Directed by Ted Peshak for Coronet Instructional Films, What to Do on a Date is a companion piece to Coronet’s other dating-etiquette shorts, prizing thrift and wholesome group activity over the “commercialized amusements” its narration warns against; it later found new life as MST3K/RiffTrax fodder for its stilted courtship choreography.
Background
What to Do on a Date was produced by Coronet Instructional Films and directed by Ted Peshak, copyrighted February 22, 1951, and running about eleven minutes. Nick works up the nerve to ask classmate Kay to a movie, only to learn she has already seen it, so the two improvise an evening instead: a high-school scavenger sale, a round of miniature golf, and a weenie roast stand in for the date he originally had in mind. Like Coronet’s other courtship shorts of the period, it is built to model acceptable teenage behavior for a classroom audience rather than to entertain on its own terms.
What to watch for
The narration keeps steering Nick and Kay away from “commercialized amusements” and toward cheap, wholesome, group-based activities, a value judgment as much as a dating tip, reflecting Coronet’s broader social-guidance catalog of the era. Its stiff courtship choreography and earnest narration are exactly what made it durable decades later as television comedy: Mystery Science Theater 3000 paired it with the feature Swamp Diamonds as its Experiment 98, broadcast July 31, 1993, introducing the short to an audience watching for unintentional humor rather than dating advice.
