Created in 1961 by the Highway Safety Foundation and Safety Enterprises, Inc., MECHANIZED DEATH is a legendary driver’s education scare film that underscores the dangers of speeding and reckless driving. Made in an era when automobiles lacked the kind of modern safety features and crash-resistant designs that we take for granted today, and featuring bloody accident footage supplied by the Ohio Highway Patrol, “Mechanized Death” reveals the highways and byways as nightmarish avenues of carnage and destruction. The film remains absolutely relevant today, with its cautionary tales about risk taking, speeding, and — death.

Some of the safety innovations that occurred in the early 1950s included putting padding wherever the driver’s head might hit a hard surface, safety glass and by mid-decade, seat belts started becoming popular as options, although their advocates had to put up with withering criticism about their effectiveness from inside and outside the industry. Even as late as 1958 a leading research group announced that the “seat belt can be dangerous to the average user under most crash conditions” and that the safety issue “was a tool of commercialism used at the expense of human life and injuries.”

Motion picture films don’t last forever; many have already been lost or destroyed. For almost two decades, we’ve worked to collect, scan and preserve the world as it was captured on 35mm, 16mm and 8mm movies — including home movies, industrial films, and other non-fiction. If you have endangered films you’d like to have scanned, or wish to donate celluloid to Periscope Film so that we can share them with the world, we’d love to hear from you. Contact us via the weblink below.

This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD and 2k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com