Believe It or Not (Second Series) #12: A Trip Through the Weird

Is it worth your time?

Honestly? Only if you have a serious itch for historical oddities or you’re a complete sucker for pre-war travel footage. If you’re looking for a plot, you’re in the wrong place. This is basically just a narrated slideshow.

Robert Ripley isn't even here. It feels a bit like showing up to a party and realizing the host left a note saying “help yourself to the snacks” and then just vanished. Leo Donnelly does the talking, and he’s... fine, I guess. He has that clipped, authoritative voice that sounds like he’s trying to sell you a war bond or a new toaster.

The Philippines and beyond

The transition between locations is almost non-existent. One minute you’re looking at something supposedly strange in Luxembourg, and then—bam—you’re in Japan. It’s a bit jarring, like someone flicking through radio stations in a dark room.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Believe It or Not (Second Series) #12 (1932) through its definitive frames.

There is a sequence involving a local craft that I’m fairly sure I’ve seen referenced in A Movie Mad Maid, or maybe I’m just hallucinating connections because the film is so thin. Some of the "oddities" are just people doing normal work, which is a bit of a letdown. But then again, maybe everything looked exotic in the 1930s if you didn't have the internet.

Odd little moments

• The narrator sounds like he’s shouting at the microphone from three feet away.
• The quality of the film stock is... well, it’s seen better days.
• There’s a weird obsession with specific hand gestures in the Japan segment.
• I kept waiting for James E. Marvin to do something, but he just sort of exists in the frame.

Watching this made me think of The Town Hall to-Night, mostly because both films feel like they belong in a time capsule that someone buried and then forgot to dig up. It’s not necessarily bad, just very detached. It’s like being shown a stranger’s vacation photos, except the stranger has been dead for eighty years.

Don’t go in expecting a cohesive experience. It’s just bits and pieces. It’s a fragment of a fragment. Sometimes that’s enough to keep you awake on a rainy Tuesday, and sometimes you’ll find yourself looking at your phone after five minutes. 🎞️

It’s not trying to be cinema. It’s just trying to be a report. And honestly? It succeeds at that, even if the report is a little bit boring.