I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

WALT DISNEY'S THE STORY OF MENSTRUATION...

BoingBoing.net informs us of the existence of The Story of Menstruation, an obscure Disney educational short from 1946 that is essentially an extended advertisement for Kotex-brand "sanitary devices". (Kotex funded the production.)

Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin gives links to the Internet Movie Database for the short and some stills from the film, but she doesn't link to the film itself.

Fortunately, someone has posted the entire Disney Story of Mensturation video at YouTube.com, the Web's finest source of copyright-infringing video content for those of us who are too pussy to use file-sharers anymore.

It doesn't have sound, and the quality of the transfer and encoding is, to put it bluntly, shit, but you can still get the gist of what is going on from the grainy visuals.

EDIT: The Story of Menstruation with sound.END OF EDIT.

This isn't a complete encapsulation of the short, but here are a few screenshots for which I thought up TEH FUNNEH!



See, while this short deals with the changes a girl's body goes through during puberty on the path to womanhood and her unsanitary monthly elimination of the uterine lining, it never actually talks about the sexual act itself. But it doesn't really even need to talk about sex, because there's this shot right at the beginning of cherry blossom petals falling, a universal symbol of sex, and that's all women ever really need to know about sex anyway, that it's something that involves a bunch of cherry blossom petals somehow.

By the way, black background, cherry blossom petals fluttering down. Why am I half-expecting to see Sakura Kinomoto's foot drop down and make that ripple?



OH NO! IT'S CREEPY LIPSTICK BABY! RUN!

I didn't even know Gerber made cosmetics.



Speaking of creepy, it's the 1940s version of lolicom anime.

What's with the goddamned panty shot? Did Tomoyo Daidouji make that dress?



Huh-huh-huh-huh-uh-huh-huh. Whoa, Beavis. They wrote "vagina". Huh-huh-uh-huh-huh-huh.

And Kevin Arnold was right on that episode of The Wonder Years when the Star Trek Voyager Emergency Medical Hologram-cum-physical education teacher, Coach Cutlip (Robert Picardo), taught sex ed. It really does look like a cow's head.



Admit it, you thought that Japanese animators were the first to put a topless shower scene in a cartoon.

Disney beat them to it by over three decades.

That's a shower cap, by the way, not some kind of freaky blonde afro.



Oh, I think she learned how to ride a bike from the way Minako Aino/Sailor V ran in episode 3 of the live-action Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, with her arms stretched out like an airplane.



I don't know which quip is more juvenile, "She's riding that horse." or just plain simple "Boing! Boing! Boing!"



DRAMA! TAKE IT TO LIVEJOURNAL!

In the days before the Internet, girls would take all of their "drama" to their bedroom mirror, I guess. She's 1940s "emo".


Ah, damn, reached the image limit for this post.



I do have to take issue with the IMDb review/comment quoted in the Boing! Boing! post that the film "helped create 'needs' for such things as foundation support, cosmetics, and a variety of 'sanitary' products in young girls as early as eleven years old." The foundation support and cosmetics are one thing (though it's not like this film created a market for make-up out of thin air). But "sanitary products"? As though women should just stand their and drip through their periods? Every sensible woman I've ever spoken to on the subject (which isn't that many, but it's more than one) thinks that the introduction of tampons and/or maxi pads to the marketplace were a very good thing for womankind. Maybe if they're one of those Blood Sisters wackos who stank up the atrium at Dawson College for a couple of days with their stinky menstrual blood artwork and who write bad spiritual poetry to their vaginas and treat their menstrual blood as some sort of holy gift would disagree, but, by and large, I think most women appreciate their sanitary products, or, at the very least, prefer them to the messy alternative.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 10:50 PM