learning channel :: OSSmile

📺 OSSmile TV

Pull up a beanbag and grab the cereal. 🥣 Everything on this dial is public domain — film whose copyright has long since lapsed — streamed straight from the Internet Archive, the planet’s greatest dusty attic. We don’t host a single frame; we just point the rabbit-ears in the right direction. No ads. No pop-ups. No “skip in 5.” Just television. 🎬

The set boots up off the air — those color bars are the old test pattern, not a dead screen. Give the POWER knob a turn and we’ll roll a genuine vintage commercial (’70s & ’80s, all free from the Archive) to warm up the tubes. Then browse the guide below — channels down the side, showtimes across the top — and click any cell to tune in a show. Use your arrow keys to move around the grid, and knock the 📼 BREAK knob any time you miss the commercials.

There are three stations on the dial and every one of them is on the air. Turn the knob along and see what the neighbours are showing.

📡 OSSmile Cable — 📚 Learning Channel

The how-to reel, the classroom short and the social-guidance film — mid-century America teaching itself how to do a thing, and how to behave.

⬤ OFF AIR — turn the set on

OFFON POWER 📼 BREAK

◉ ABOUT THIS STATION A fair amount of this is period propaganda as much as it is instruction. These films carry the attitudes of mid-century America — who does which job, how a girl is expected to behave, what a family is supposed to look like — and now and then that is the entire point of the film. The genuinely ugly ones are not here; being free and being period is not reason enough to run something. The rest are marked ⌛ of its time and their notes say what they are. They are worth seeing as historical artifacts, which is exactly what they are.

📺 GUIDE

7:00 AM

7:30 AM

8:00 AM

8:30 AM

9:00 AM

9:30 AM

CH 21

CH 57

CH 68

CH 71

CH 93

CH 97

Full lineup — every short links straight to the Internet Archive:

▶ CH 21 · 7:00 AM — “How to Use the Dial Phone” (1927) AT&T teaching America what to do with the strange new spinning wheel on the telephone. Place your finger in the hole over the figure, pull the dial round to the stop, let go. The first how-to for a gadget everyone now carries in a pocket.
▶ CH 21 · 7:30 AM — “How to Be Well Groomed” (1949) ⌛ of its time Siblings Don and Sue run their grooming routine across a school week, building to Friday night. Coronet’s house style at its purest — and the grooming standards, and who is held to which, are entirely those of 1949.
▶ CH 21 · 8:00 AM — “Cheating” (1952) John cheats on a test and the film turns full expressionist about it — angled shadows, accusing faces, the lot. Far stranger and better shot than a classroom short on honesty has any business being.
▶ CH 21 · 8:30 AM — “The Snob” (1958) Why is a high-school girl such a snob? Centron takes its own question seriously and comes back with something much closer to sympathy than to scolding.
▶ CH 21 · 9:00 AM — “Fire! Patty Learns What to Do” (1951) Fire safety from a child’s point of view, shot in and around the real 1947 Chatsworth fire when much of the San Fernando Valley was still farmland. Directed by Emily Benton Frith; the location footage is the reason to stay.
▶ CH 57 · 7:00 AM — “Duck and Cover” (1951) ⌛ of its time Bert the Turtle shows schoolchildren what to do in an atomic attack. Made for American classrooms at the height of the nuclear scare, and added to the National Film Registry in 2004 — a real record of how that particular fear was taught to children.
▶ CH 57 · 7:30 AM — “Maintaining Classroom Discipline” (1947) A teacher-training film: the same lesson taught badly, then well, by the same man. Mr. Grimes losing the room and then winning it back is a small masterpiece of before-and-after, and holds up as teaching advice.
▶ CH 57 · 8:00 AM — “The Home Economics Story (Part I)” (1951) ⌛ of its time Four years in the lives of four home-economics students at Iowa State. A recruiting film, and an unusually detailed look at a mid-century women’s university course — the futures it lays out for them are strictly the ones 1951 was offering.
▶ CH 57 · 8:30 AM — “Good Table Manners” (1951) A badly behaved fourteen-year-old meets himself at twenty-one and is given a tour of the cutlery. The time-travel framing is doing an enormous amount of work for a film about elbows.
▶ CH 68 · 7:00 AM — “How to Buy Meat (Part I)” (1970) A U.S. Department of Agriculture consumer specialist walks through the grades, the cuts, and what to do with them once they are home. Government work, so it explains everything twice, which is oddly soothing.
▶ CH 68 · 8:00 AM — “How to Use Classroom Films” (1963) A classroom film about how to show a classroom film — choose it, preview it, run it, then actually talk about it afterwards. Pleasingly recursive, and roughly the reason half this station exists.
▶ CH 68 · 8:30 AM — “A Date With Your Family” (1950) ⌛ of its time The famous one. Dinner in an affluent household where pleasant, unemotional behaviour is the entire objective, and the children are advised to manage their feelings — even to fib — for the sake of the evening. A period document about family as performance, and it is very odd.
▶ CH 68 · 9:00 AM — “I Want to Be a Secretary” (1941) ⌛ of its time A young woman trains and job-hunts through pre-war American offices — one of Coronet’s earliest films, and a remarkable look at the machines and the rooms. The range of work it can imagine for her is exactly the range 1941 imagined.
▶ CH 71 · 7:00 AM — “Pattern for Smartness” (1948) Home-sewn clothes presented as high fashion — a full sewing-room how-to wrapped around a runway show. Genuinely useful on reading a pattern, and the fabric is gorgeous.
▶ CH 71 · 8:00 AM — “How Quiet Helps at School” (1953) For very young children: the noise in you is fine, it simply belongs outside on the playground. Gentle, and about as low-stakes as the guidance film ever gets.
▶ CH 71 · 8:30 AM — “Shy Guy” (1947) Phil — a teenage Dick York, years before Bewitched — is new at his high school and studies the popular kids to work out the trick. The answer turns out to be offering to help people, which is a kinder moral than the genre usually lands on.
▶ CH 71 · 9:00 AM — “Finding Your Life’s Work” (1940) ⌛ of its time Vocational guidance aimed at teenagers coming out of the Depression: pick the work, not the wage. Warm-hearted, and the careers on its list are sorted along the lines its era sorted them.
▶ CH 93 · 7:00 AM — “How to Listen To… New Dimensions in Sound” (1957) A Jam Handy demonstration of the hot new audio technology: stereo. Two speakers, explained from first principles to an audience who had never heard a sound arrive from the left.
▶ CH 93 · 8:00 AM — “Let’s Be Good Citizens at School” (1953) Picking up somebody else’s dropped coat, being careful with the shared things, making the new child feel they belong to the group. Small kindnesses, filmed very earnestly indeed.
▶ CH 93 · 8:30 AM — “Act Your Age” (1949) Jim, an emotionally immature teenager, is walked through evaluating his own temper and working out his problems rather than carving them into the furniture. An early, patient attempt at teaching a kid to name what he is feeling.
▶ CH 93 · 9:00 AM — “One Got Fat: Bicycle Safety” (1963) Bicycle safety, except every child wears an ape mask, breaks one rule, and is removed from the film for it. Narrated with total calm by Edward Everett Horton. Legendary, genuinely unnerving, impossible to forget.
▶ CH 97 · 7:00 AM — “The Wonderful World of Wash ’n’ Wear” (1958) ⌛ of its time Synthetic fabrics meet the electric washing machine and laundry day is declared solved forever. Hosted by Jeffrey Lynn. Of its time in one specific way: it never once wonders who in the house is doing the washing.
▶ CH 97 · 8:00 AM — “School Rules: How They Help Us” (1953) Argues that rules exist to make the day smoother and safer rather than duller, walks through everyday scenes where they quietly do, and explains how a new pupil learns them. Tidy civics for eight-year-olds.
▶ CH 97 · 8:30 AM — “Habit Patterns” (1954) ⌛ of its time Barbara oversleeps and the narrator never once forgives her. A good-girl/bad-girl short with famously harrowing narration; the standards it holds a teenage girl to are entirely those of 1954, and it is best taken as a record of them.
▶ CH 97 · 9:00 AM — “When You Are a Pedestrian” (1948) Crossing the road, argued out on the streets of Oakland and then on a tabletop with model cars and dolls standing in for people. This is the film that started the Prelinger Archives — the first reel of the collection this whole station is built on.

🍿 Want to run your own theater?

The Prelinger Archives are the deep seam here — over ten thousand American ephemeral films, and the source of every single title on this station. Mid-century instructional and social-guidance film is gloriously strange, and almost all of it is free:

📽️ archive.org · Prelinger Archives — the collection this station is built from
🏫 archive.org · Educational Films — thousands more, the classroom shelf proper
📼 archive.org · Classic TV Commercials — the vintage ads on our 📼 BREAK knob live here
🔎 Search any title + “public domain” — if it has an /embed/ page, it drops right in here.

We only embed shorts & spots that are genuinely free to share — public domain, Creative Commons, or the free-use Prelinger Archives. Those ’70s and ’80s commercials are period advertisements; the brands belong to their owners, we just point at the archived tape and sell nothing. The science films are period films too — where one carries the science of its day rather than of ours, its blurb says so. If we got a call wrong, leave a note and we’ll pull it.

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📺 OSSmile TV

📡 OSSmile Cable — 📚 Learning Channel

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