Checking out Niagara and some horses with Lowell Thomas

Is it worth your time?

Honestly, only if you have a weird itch for 1930s newsreel aesthetics or you're really into horse genealogy. It’s a short, breezy watch, but don’t go in expecting a deep dive. If you like stuff like Broadcasting for that authentic archival flavor, you might get a kick out of it. If you're bored by old travelogues, you'll probably hate this. 🐎

The Niagara footage is exactly what you think it is. It’s loud, it’s watery, and the camera lingers on the mist for a good long while. It has that slightly shaky, high-contrast look that makes everything feel like it happened in another dimension.

Then, suddenly, we are in Pomona. We leave the roar of the falls for the quiet, dusty calm of the Kellogg farm. The transition is jarring, like changing the channel while the remote is stuck.

The horses are beautiful, sure. But the movie gets intensely specific about their breeding lines. It feels a bit like reading a grocery list written in cursive. You can tell Thomas is really into these Arab horses, but the enthusiasm doesn't quite jump off the screen.

There's a weird moment where the camera stays on a horse’s profile for, I don’t know, maybe forty seconds? It’s just the horse looking left, then looking right. It starts to feel a bit personal, like I'm interrupting the horse's lunch.

The whole thing feels a bit like an ancestor to the kind of stuff you'd see on the History Channel at 3 AM. It’s not trying to be The Inventors or anything complicated. It just exists to show you things you probably haven't seen in person.

I found myself wondering if anyone actually learned about horse breeding from this. It feels more like a mood piece than an educational one. Sometimes the silence is just filled with the sound of hooves hitting dirt, and honestly, that’s better than the narration anyway. 🌊

It’s not a masterpiece. It’s just a window into a Tuesday afternoon from ninety years ago. Take it for what it is.