In the 1960s, depictions of violence on the screen, whether in films or television, fact or fiction, contributed to a public concern in the United States that unexpected, irrational, or political violence could not be attributed solely to other cultures or other times. This paper investigates Cold War science films exploring human nature, at the intersection of entertainment and pedagogy. The films include public television documentaries (like the American Museum of Natural History’s co-produced Time of Man), a Playboy production of Morris' The Naked Ape and films developed for teaching elementary school students about human nature through anthropology and animal behaviour (Man: A Course of Study). I argue that visions of humans as rats packed into over-crowded cities were largely supplanted by the notion that given the right circumstances, all humans could be murderous, naked apes—a curious amalgamation that largely followed Robert Ardrey’s simplistic depiction of man as a vicious animal, temporarily endowed with the scientific authority of Konrad Lorenz and Desmond Morris. “Man the hunter” became man the hunted. By the mid-1970s, however, academic scientists almost universally dismissed the idea that humans were mere killer apes and the idea all but vanished from public science conversations as well. Even so, scientific theories of human nature spread far beyond polite dinner conversation and became an aspect of public science that scientists used to define their professional identity, either by embracing these images of humanity or by whole-heartedly rejecting them.