Believe It or Not (Second Series) #11: Just Some Weird Stuff

Is this actually worth your time?

Honestly, only if you have a weird itch to see black-and-white footage of a guy pulling a car with his own hair. It is a strange, dusty relic that feels like stumbling onto a public access channel from a century ago. If you want a deep dive or any real context, you are going to be bored to tears. But if you like watching 1930s chickens get confused, maybe give it a shot.

Robert Ripley is totally absent here. It feels like the office intern took over the camera and just started filming whatever random stuff was lying around the studio. Leo Donnelly steps in to narrate, but his voice has that specific, slightly frantic energy that makes every sentence sound like a breaking news bulletin.

The highlight reel of bizarre

The church service on the St. Lawrence River is the kind of thing that makes you stop and wonder, why? Seeing a bunch of people in hats sitting in rowboats to listen to a sermon is just peak early-century oddity. It is not profound, but it is definitely memorable.

Then there is the critter section. Watching a chicken try to figure out how to be a duck because of a training buddy is… well, it is confusing. It is not quite as charming as Brownie's Busy Day, but it has that same weird, low-budget curiosity that makes these old shorts stay in your head for way too long.

• A motorized blacksmith shop. Yes, really.
• The Chrysler Building cameo in the background is a nice little touch for the history nerds.
• The sand art in bottles. I honestly spent five minutes wondering how they fit the funnel in there.

The editing is purely chaotic. You jump from a horse with two hooves to a massive sculpture, and there is zero attempt to make the segments connect. It reminded me a bit of the frantic pace in You Don't Know What You're Doin'! but with way more feathers and way fewer cartoons.

The segment on the platypus is hilarious in hindsight. They treat it like this mythical, barely-believable cryptid. It is funny how much the world has changed since they thought this thing was the peak of biological strangeness. 🦆

It is not a masterpiece. It is just a pile of curiosities stacked on top of each other. Sometimes the narrator lingers on a shot of a bottle for ten seconds too long, and you start to notice the dust on the lens. But hey, that is the charm, right? It feels real, even if it is completely inconsequential.