About This Tape
Six minutes and forty-two seconds. That’s all the Ohio Department of Public Safety needed to traumatize an entire generation of Ohio schoolchildren about bus safety. “The Bus and Us” (catalog number HSY #0077) is a government-produced educational video that was distributed to schools across Ohio, probably shown during safety week, and then forgotten about.
The premise is straightforward — teach kids how to be safe around school buses. The execution is anything but. A kid comes home and tells his mom all about how children get killed by buses. Mom is clearly annoyed. There’s a catchy tune involved. It’s exactly the kind of dead-serious-but-accidentally-hilarious educational content that makes VHS archiving worthwhile.
Lost Media Potential
State government educational videos are exactly the kind of media that gets lost. They were never commercially sold. Schools discarded them when curricula changed. Nobody thought to preserve a seven-minute bus safety tape from Ohio. As of cataloging, this title does not appear on the Internet Archive or YouTube. There’s a real chance this is one of the last surviving copies — and if you grew up in Ohio in the late ’80s or ’90s, you might have seen it in your elementary school cafeteria.
Tape Contents
- School bus safety instructions
- Loading/unloading demonstration
- Classroom safety segment
- Original safety song
Stream Notes
Chat absolutely loved this one. Something about the combination of the catchy tune, the kid’s delivery, and the mom’s visible annoyance at hearing about bus-related child fatalities over dinner just hit perfectly. It’s under seven minutes long but it left a bigger impression than tapes ten times its length. That’s the magic of the weird ones.