Every few weeks or so, I get an email forward from well-meaning relatives warning me about some new threat to life and limb. Among the things, according to the Internet hive mind, that we’re supposed to worry about:

Crooks stealing personal information off our hotel room key cards

Thieves using sophisticated technology to remotely unlock our car doors

Pyrex glassware (it can blow up in your stove!)

Pancake mix (mold spores in it can cause an allergic reaction and send you into anaphylactic shock!)

Drinking Coke (it’s ACID!)

My personal favorite was a news team’s video of an identity theft scheme so elaborate it would put the Ocean’s 11 gang to shame: An actor posing as a thief steals a woman’s purse from an outdoor café. When she discovers the theft, she panics, and his accomplice, pretending to be a neutral bystander, calms her down and calls “her” bank for her on his cell phone. Unbeknownst to her, he’s actually called a third accomplice pretending to be a bank associate – complete with a recording of office chatter playing in the background for added authenticity. When she punches her PIN into the phone, he records it. The “thieves” then reveal the scheme to the woman – who, shockingly, does not punch any of them in the eye – and warn her that, had they been an actual criminal organization, they could have wiped her bank account clean. Cut to the narrator who intones that this could happen to you, audience member!

Well, yes, it could, if you lack the sufficient presence of mind and/or common sense not to let a perfect stranger dial your “bank” for you, and if all the crooks this smart and organized decide your puny checking account is better worth their effort than, say, robbing Fort Knox or starting a colony of superhumans on the moon.

When did we become this paranoid? I mean, parents don’t even let their kids walk to school alone anymore! Surely, things were better fifty years ago, right? . . . Right?

Not if you believe the scaremongers at Sid Davis Productions. Their educational films Boys Beware (1961) and Girls Beware (1961), available at the wonderful Internet Archive (or you can watch ‘em below), make today’s fearmongering tele-“journalists” look like amateurs.

First, there’s Judy. Judy wants to babysit, so she posts an advertisement on the bulletin board down at her local supermarket. She accepts a sitting job, her client picks her up at home, and a few days later, the narrator tells us, “The report came in. Judy’s body had been found on a lonely desert road.”

Slut.

Then there’s Mary. She doesn’t do anything as dangerous at babysitting. But she does meet an “older boy” down at the local malt shop, and, next thing you know, she’s making out with him in the park, the camera suddenly pans up towards the trees and sky, and . . . then Mary’s in trouble and has to be “taken out of school and placed under the guidance of the juvenile authorities.” Mary’s vignette ends on a shot of her principal looking very disapproving as his hand ominously taps on the folder that doubtless holds her Permanent Record.

Sex and independent business, girls, will get you into danger any time! Better to stay home and knit, or something.

But, boys, don’t think you’re off the hook just yet. You see, there are sick men out there. Their sickness is not visible, like smallpox, but it is no less dangerous and contagious. It is a sickness of the mind – the sickness of the dread hoMOsexual.

Ralph the homosexual.

You can identify homosexuals because they have creepy mustaches, wear sunglasses, and have putzy names like Ralph. Also, they hang around public bathrooms. And they play basketball in tuxedos. Yes, one minute you’re shooting hoops with a dude who looks like a refugee from a wedding party, and the next you’re “riding in the shadow of death.” Or, worse, you wind up selling your virtue at the Sleep-Eazy Motel, get arrested, and presumably, are sent to reform school along with Mary.

But no one bothers to point out the biggest danger of all in these videos: the cars. There were 36,399 highway fatalities and 27,909 non-highway vehicle-related fatalities in the U.S. in 1960. The murder total for that same year? 9,110. Folks in 1960 were 7 times more likely to die in a car crash than be murdered. They were many, many more times likely to die of a heart attack, stroke, cancer, or pneumonia than be murdered. (And, to be fair, Sid Davis did make the equally melodramatic “The Bottle and the Throttle,” which is about the dangers of drinking and driving.)

The thing is, eating too much fatty food, not exercising, and driving a car are quotidian risks. They’re not the kind of thing you email your grandchild or niece about, and any film about them is going to be pretty boring. (I wouldn’t mind seeing old Sid take a crack at it, though: “Little did Susie know, when she chowed down on that 27-cent taco at the malt shop, that she was dining in the shadow of death. Sixty years later, the report came in. Her body had been found on her lonely kitchen floor.”) But, chances are, they’re going to be what gets you in the end.

So follow the basic health advice you learned back in elementary school. Use your head. Let the rest take care of itself. Or, you know what, don’t. Accept the risks and laze around, eat that fatty food, forgo the seat belt, and even smoke if it makes you happy. That’s a perfectly legitimate option, especially if your preferred fatty food is Krispy Kreme donuts. (Mmm, Krispy Kremes . . .)  But either way, even if your Pyrex does blow up in the oven, sending a shard of glass through your jugular, you can have the satisfaction of knowing, in your final moments, that you didn’t live in fear.