Clara Cleans Her Teeth

CLARA CLEANS HER TEETH can be found, as I write this, on Youtube. It is, I suppose, a necessity for Disney fanatics. It is not a good movie.

Disney made a couple of promotional films for dentists in the silent era, TOMMY TUCKER'S TOOTH, and this one, starring his niece, who also filled in on the ALICE series for a couple of episodes. It is a very earnest short subject on the necessity of cleaning your teeth, and you see people brushing their teeth a lot.

This being a Disney movie, Clara, whose teeth hurt, but who refuses to go see the dentist, has a dream in which animated toothbrushes appear to her and scare her into going. Her teeth are filled, she joins the horde of obsessively-compulsively brushing children and the movie ends at that point.

In short, this is a lot like all those earnest Public Service announcements you got in the 1950s, which told you to duck and cover to protect yourself from an atomic bomb or to always signal when you made a turn, which would stop your blood from ever covering the highway: bizarre from a modern viewpoint, as will much of our concerns seem in eighty years. I would give it a 1, but its historical interest saves it from that dread fate.