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 distributed to schools across Ohio. Probably shown during safety week. Then forgotten.
The premise is simple enough: teach kids how to be safe around school buses. The execution is something else. 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 content that makes this whole archiving thing worthwhile.
Chat loved it. Something about the catchy tune, the kid’s delivery, and the mom’s visible annoyance at hearing about bus-related child fatalities over dinner just landed. It’s under seven minutes long and left a bigger impression than tapes ten times its length.
Lost Media
State government educational videos are exactly the kind of media that disappears. 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. If you grew up in Ohio in the late ’80s or early ’90s, you might have seen it in your elementary school cafeteria.
For a very different experience of Ohio in the same era — six hours of Columbus commercial TV rather than six minutes of state-produced school video — the Columbus Ohio 1992 tape covers multiple channels of Ohio local TV from that period. And for another Ohio government artifact that never made it to retail, the institutional distribution model here is the same reason the Storm of the Century tape is worth watching for the Columbus local content alone — local affiliate material disappears just as fast as school-distributed VHS.
