With the course of study I’m teaching, this short came to mind, as riffed by Mike and the Bots.

Like most ’50s educational shorts, this one’s a stagey, stolid affair, but with some pretty solid information and a point that’s hard to argue with: about keeping a budget and managing your spending (actually, a lot of the comments on YouTube are people noting how useful the lesson is). Also like a lot of them, it shows a nicely creative flair by framing it around an actual story; in this case involving the spirit of Benjamin Franklin (summoned by a half-dollar, which were a thing back then) coming to advise the scrawny youth on how to handle money.

By the way, I really like the bottom-budget ‘ghost’ effect of simply projecting a shadow of the actor onto the wall. It’s cheap and simple, but it gets the job done and it ties in with the silhouette on the coin that started the vision.

The riffing’s also top-drawer (albeit they get a fact wrong with “could have your slave press my suit?” as Franklin was an abolitionist. “Ow, my gout!” is dead-on, though), as it usually is with the stranger and more fantasy-based shorts. Enjoy!