This film is part of Free
Play Safe - Frisbee
Notorious British safety film in which young Jimmy makes the fatal mistake of trying to retrieve his Frisbee.
Overview
An orange Frisbee inadvertently soars over the fence of an electricity substation, an innocent, almost banal image that less than a minute later leads directly to the 60,000-volt burning of young Jimmy as he makes the fatal mistake of trying to retrieve it himself. Frisbee won writer-director David Eady a BAFTA nomination, and with good reason: it’s one of the simplest, bluntest and most effective of all British safety films, constantly namechecked even in the briefest histories of the medium.
A successful safety film needs to get under the viewer’s skin by positing a situation that they could easily get caught up in themselves, and Frisbee brilliantly managed this by latching onto one of the era’s great crazes. Invented in 1948, and mass-marketed in the 1950s (the name ‘Frisbee’ was coined in 1957, inspired by the lids of Frisbie pie tins), it became a professional sport in 1964 and by the time Frisbee was first shown, practically every British family would have encountered one themselves, either through ownership or its ubiquity in open public spaces.
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