All That Glitters Is Not Goldfish

Bud Fisher’s 1916 one-reeler drops Mutt and Jeff—those spindle-limbed harlequins of the funnies—into a ramshackle pet shop whose cages clang like tarnished chandeliers. Their new kingdom reeks of sawdust, brine, and the coppery tang of pipe dreams: finches shriek arias, goldfish shimmer like debased doubloons, and a single scarlet macaw keeps reciting the prices backwards. Jeff, ever the beanpole optimist, fancies they’ll corner the market on song and scales; Mutt, nose aquiver for easy coin, eyes the gawping street urchins and calculates how many minnows equal a martini. Between them flits a bird-brained chaos—cages spring open, beaks nip, fish slap wetly across the floorboards, and the cash register coughs up only coughs. In twelve crowded minutes the storefront becomes a carousel of spilled seed, busted aquariums, and pneumatic slapstick, resolving when our dim entrepreneurs auction off their last gasping carp to a deaf dowager who mistakes it for a hatpin. The curtain falls on the duo sweeping up shards, still arguing over who miscounted the hermit crabs, while the macaw squawks the moral: all that glitters is not goldfish.