Kids These Days: A 1923 Survey of Grade School and High School Kids’ Favorite Stars and Movies

A lot of the fan surveys of the silent era were open to all ages, which is great but more specific data is always welcome. The Educational Screen, a top do-gooder film magazine that graded movies as Harmless, Doubtful or Trash and rated my beloved Michael Strogoff as “too exciting” for children under 15, published a survey of students attending Evansville, Indiana schools. I found it quite interesting and wanted to share some of the highlights.

The survey divides much of its data into boys and girls in high school and grade school: 891 high school girls, 754 high school boys, 1687 grade school girls, 1667 grade school boys.

The list of top films does not divide by sex but does divide by age. It is calculated by the number of times the film in question made the children’s lists and the order of the films is by the preference of the high school students, not the grade schoolers.

I will be listing the title of the film along with the number of votes from each category of children:

Title of Film	High School	Grade School
The Sheik	439	255
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse	406	136
The Three Musketeers	226	208
Over the Hill	198	231
The Birth of a Nation	157	0
Smilin’ Through	157	70
Way Down East	195	96
Peck’s Bad Boy	124	312
School Days	85	208
Tarzan Series	84	368
Daddy Long Legs	81	152
The Kid	77	113
Fascination	67	0
Penrod	62	188
Go and Get It	60	56

As you can well imagine, the magazine’s editors were more than a little miffed that the children chose a red hot bodice-ripper like The Sheik as their favorite picture. And they were not much more pleased about Four Horsemen, which had been censored for distribution elsewhere but not in Evansville. GASP!

But you read it here first, the kids of 1923 went in for red hot romance! Rawr!

Me? The fact that the grade school kids delivered zero votes for Birth of a Nation warmed the cockles of my jaded heart, though I am not sure if Peck’s Bad Boy is an ideal choice either. The whole calculation process seems screwy, especially since Way Down East and Smilin’ Through both received more votes than BOAN but were placed much lower. CONSPIRACY! GET ME MY RED STRING!

The universal praise here and elsewhere for the utterly forgotten Fox release Over the Hill to the Poorhouse continues to intrigue me. The film survives but I have not seen it. Do let me know if you have!

School Days, Go and Get It and Penrod all starred Wesley Barry, Fascination had Mae Murray and Smilin’ Through featured Norma Talmadge. Of these five films, I believe only Smilin’ Through is on home video.

For favorite actors, we will see that favorite films do not necessarily correlate. Once again, the votes are divided by the grade level of the children.

Actor Name	High School	Grade School
Rudolph Valentino	564	328
Wallace Reid	423	315
Douglas Fairbanks	391	496
Constance Talmadge	253	291
Harold Lloyd	236	280
Mary Pickford	228	819
Norma Talmadge	226	240
Tom Mix	218	1038
Charlie Chaplin	155	413
William S. Hart	0	525

I do not agree with this calculating at all. By raw numbers, Tom Mix and Mary Pickford should have been number one and two respectively with Douglas Fairbanks remaining in third place. They’re just mad about the Sheik thing, aren’t they?

The younger children also rate William S. Hart far higher than their older counterparts, proving once again that I would much rather hang around with them than their big brothers and sisters.

I don’t think there are any huge surprises here but I do want to draw your attention to the Talmadge sisters, who just do not get as much love as they should these days.

Oh, and one more thing before we go: The high school students paid an average of $0.28 admission and the grade school students paid between $0.14 and $0.17 admission. That comes out to $4 for the older kids and between $2 and $2.50 for the younger ones. With prices like those, I’d go to the movies multiple times per week (as most of them did) and get popcorn too!