ORAL HYGIENE

Bits and Bites
A celebration of Oral Hygiene

 Oral Exams
Test your dental advertising IQ

Look Ma, No Cavities
A Bite-size history of brushing your teeth

Tooth and Lies
All about toothpaste

Pulling for You
Whole pop dentists' hall of fame and more

Bad Breath
Yours and your dog's

Coming Extractions
Dentists in the movies

Strangers in Dentifrice
From Shanghai to Ceylon to Switzerland


 Coming Extractions
  Dentists in the movies

They’re only there to help you keep your gums and teeth healthy, but dentists don’t get much respect in movies—they’re portrayed, often as not, as sadists and sometimes worse (e.g., Nitrous oxide abusers, unrepentant Nazis, that sort of thing). We’ll show you what we mean:

• Little Shop of Horrors (1960, musical 1986): Dentist as drug-abusing, woman-abusing, laughing gas sniffer who deserves to be fed to a large mutant carnivorous plant.
• The Dentist (1932): The first movie of this name was a short one, and featured comedian W. C. fields as a bumbling, sadistic tooth extractor. (Available in a collection of five short features called A Fifth of Fields)

• The Dentist (1996): A campy horror film in which a deranged dentist goes on a drilling spree. 		 

• The Marathon Man (1976): Sadistic Nazi dentist drills excruciatingly through Dustin Hoffman’s front tooth.

Good movies, huh!
You can buy them at the
Wholepop video store

• Eversmile, New Jersey (1989): This one is unusual — about a wacky traveling dentist who preaches the benefits of dental health.