Milk: “The Tip Tops in Peppyland” 1934 New York State Bureau of Milk Publicity

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Includes animation which appears to be the work of Max Fleischer (Betty Boop, Popeye…), who frequently did work for the film’s producer, Jam Handy.

“Animated and live-action film for children showing the beneficial effects of milk…

PART-ANIMATED, PART-LIVE ACTION FILM FOR CHILDREN SHOWING MILK PRODUCTION, CONTENTS & NUTRIENTS OF MILK, AND HOW MILK IMPARTS PEP, STRENGTH, ETC. GOOD SCENES OF CHILDREN IN EARLY 1930S.

“Pep,” “Strength” and “Health” the three Tip-Tops show how drinking milk enables children to be active, acrobatic and successful in business. Unassuming and primitive compared to other Jam Handy pictures, Tip-Tops contains many fascinating images of what appear to be real children, 1930s-style, representing diverse social and economic backgrounds. An engaging animated sequence describes the vitamins and their function, using imagery that momentarily gets creepy.
Taken as a whole, the dairy industry is one of the most unsung and prolific propagandists of the twentieth century. Through the American Dairy Association, the National Dairy Council and many state and local organizations, the industry has successfully linked consumption of dairy products with health and fostered a friendly regulatory climate. A study of the many hundreds, perhaps thousands of dairy-produced films that survive would reveal recurring cliches and a few unusually bizarre films like this one.”

NEW VERSION with improved video & sound:

Originally a public domain film from the Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied.

Wikipedia license:

Milk is a white liquid produced by the mammary glands of mammals. It is the primary source of nutrition for young mammals before they are able to digest other types of food. Early-lactation milk contains colostrum, which carries the mother’s antibodies to the baby and can reduce the risk of many diseases in the baby. It also contains many other nutrients.

As an agricultural product, milk is extracted from mammals and used as food for humans. Worldwide, dairy farms produced about 730 million tonnes of milk in 2011. India is the world’s largest producer and consumer of milk, yet neither exports nor imports milk. New Zealand, the European Union’s 28 member states, Australia, and the United States are the world’s largest exporters of milk and milk products. China and Russia are the world’s largest importers of milk and milk products.

Throughout the world, there are more than 6 billion consumers of milk and milk products. Over 750 million people live within dairy farming households. Milk is a key contributor to improving nutrition and food security particularly in developing countries. Improvements in livestock and dairy technology offer significant promise in reducing poverty and malnutrition in the world…

For over eleven thousand years, cow’s milk has been processed into dairy products such as cream, butter, yogurt, kefir, ice cream, and especially the more durable and easily transportable product, cheese. Modern industrial processes produce casein, whey protein, lactose, condensed milk, powdered milk, and many other food-additive and industrial products.

In many cultures of the world, especially the Western world, humans continue to consume milk beyond infancy, using the milk of other animals (especially cattle, goats and sheep) as a food product. Initially, the ability to digest milk was limited to children as adults did not produce lactase, an enzyme necessary for digesting milk. Milk products were converted to curd, cheese and other products to reduce lactose, which was a toxin for adults. Thousands of years ago, a chance mutation spread in human populations in Europe enabling them to produce lactase in adulthood. This opened a new source of nutrition which could sustain populations when other food sources failed.

Humans are an exception in the natural world for consuming milk past infancy, despite the fact that most adult humans show some degree of lactose intolerance. The sugar lactose is found only in milk, forsythia flowers, and a few tropical shrubs. The enzyme needed to digest lactose, lactase, reaches its highest levels in the small intestines after birth and then begins a slow decline unless milk is consumed regularly. On the other hand, those groups who do continue to tolerate milk often have exercised great creativity in using the milk of domesticated ungulates, not only of cattle, but also sheep, goats, yaks, water buffalo, horses, reindeers and camels. The largest producer and consumer of cattle and buffalo milk in the world is India…