What is the historical significance of entertainment from the Great Depression?

: What is the historical significance of entertainment from the Great Depression?
I’m writing a paper about entertainment during the 1930s and need to prove how it is historically significant. What effect does it have on us today? What lesson does it teach us? What does it say about society at the time?

My paper isn’t due for a while but I need help thinking of ideas..
Thnx!

Answers and Views:

Answer by Smurfett
Movies were huge! They were a way to escape the bad times, for awhile.

You could look at what kind of movies, like musicals. Musicals were hot in the 30’s, with dancing and singing all through the movie. Sometimes the picture could be classified as a gigantic music video as there really was no plot other than singing and dancing.

You could do the noir films…the dark sets and mysterious doings…..

Or, you could study the blockbusters of the era and contrast them with modern blockbusters. Would this film make it today? Why or why not?

Cartoons were getting started then, but that would be hard to do. Thousands and thousands to choose from on today’s end. But not in the 30’s.

It would be hard to do something with newsreels. Where would you find them?

Hopefully some of these help you get you going!

Answer by SmartAZ
The 30s saw the peak of Betty Boop’s career. People were starting to complain about her bare breasted performances, and the general air of improper displays in many movies. The industry responded with the censorship board, which grew stricter and sillier until the filming of Gone With The Wind. That movie hinged on a single word, one of the words you just didn’t say in public. This was at a time when the top play on Broadway was “Damn Yankee” and radio personalities called it “Darn Yankee”. So the censors had a challenge: forbid that word and put the studio out of business, or allow it and put themselves out of business. The censors caved.

If you are a religious person you could make a good case that the devil encouraged the Betty Boop cartoons specifically to get censors, and then drove the censors to flights of silliness, and then promoted that book with that word, just so he could use Playboy to poke fun at the censors and blame the whole mess on the Church, even though the church had almost nothing to do with any of it.

Answer by steve
the depression shows a long list of music change as well. if you listen to the style of music you will actually hear people singing about not having bread and jobs and such and the jazz age was around this time as well. so in perspective the rich people listened to mostly jazz while the poor listen to mostly the sadder music