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Cult Review
Archivist John
Senior Editor
If you’re looking for a lost masterpiece, keep walking. 🚶♂️
This is strictly for the people who spend their Friday nights digging through archives of early sound shorts.
The rest of you will probably be bored out of your minds within four minutes.
It’s a McDougall Kids short, which is basically the store-brand version of Our Gang.
There’s a chicken. There’s a lot of running.
At one point, a kid falls over and it looks like it actually hurt, which is the most real thing in the whole ten minutes.
I noticed the background looks incredibly fake, even for 1929.
The audio is the real star here, and not in a good way..
It has that hiss that never stops.
It’s like the movie is breathing on you through a tin can.
Nanette Fabray is in this as a tiny kid, which is wild to see.
She’s got more energy than the rest of the cast combined.
The McDougall Kids just don't have that it factor that made the Little Rascals work.
They mostly just stand around looking confused until someone tells them to move.
There’s a scene where they’re trying to catch the bird and it just feels... long.
Like, they didn't have enough film for a second take so they just kept whatever happened.
It remind me a bit of the chaos in Fire Fighters but with less charm.
Actually, it’s more like A Good Little Devil in how stagey it feels.
Everything feels like it’s happening in a very small box.
I think i saw a crew members shadow for a split second near the barn door.
Or maybe it was just a smudge on the lens.
Bobby Newman has this one expression that looks like he's trying to remember if he left the stove on.
The McDougall Kids series was supposed to be a rival to Hal Roach, but you can see why it didn't stick.
The script feels like it was written on a napkin during lunch.
I actually liked the part where the chicken outsmarts the kids.
Does it matter? Not really.
The whole thing is over before you can even get annoyed by it.
It's short. That's its best quality.
If you like seeing how movies struggled to find their feet when sound first showed up, it's worth a look.
Otherwise, you’re better off watching literally anything else.
I fell down a rabbit hole looking at the other kids in this.
None of them really did much after this, did they?
Except Fabray, obviously.
The chicken deserved an Oscar for putting up with those kids. 🐔
It's just a weird, dusty lil thing.
I’m glad I watched it, but I’m never watching it again.
IMDb 7.5
1927
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