Mike Fright is basically 20 minutes of kids yelling and I love it

If you have a headache today, do not watch this. 📢

It is easily the loudest twenty minutes of film I have seen in a long time. It’s perfect for anyone who misses the old Little Rascals shorts, but if you can't stand kids screaming, you’ll hate it.

The whole thing is just the gang going to a radio station for an amateur hour. That is the entire plot.

Spanky is wearing this tiny little suit that looks like it’s squeezing him. He has that face he always makes where he looks like a 40-year-old man trapped in a toddler's body.

The radio station is full of these weird acts before the kids get their turn. There are these two little girls dancing and one of them looks like she is vibrating at a frequency that shouldn't be humanly possible.

I noticed the adults in this movie look actually tired. Not movie tired, but "I have been in a room with thirty children for ten hours" tired.

There is a guy trying to manage the acts and he looks like he's about to have a breakdown every time a kid opens their mouth. It feels much more real than the polished stuff in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Then we get the International Silver String Band. This is the peak of the movie.

They aren't even playing real instruments mostly. They have washboards and pans and they are just hitting things.

Stymie is on the drums—or what counts as drums—and he is just in his own world. I love how the kids in these old shorts never seem to be looking at the same thing at the same time.

One kid in the back is just staring at the ceiling for like three straight minutes. I wonder what he was thinking about.

The music they make is just a wall of sound. It’s catchy but also kind of painful if you turn the volume up too high.

There is this one lady who tries to sing opera while the kids are messing with the sound effect machines. It’s hilarious.

She’s trying to be all serious and professional, and then you just hear a BOOM or a whistle right in her face. Her facial expressions are so over the top it becomes funny, then annoying, then funny again.

The dog, Pete, is just hanging out too. He always looks like he’s the only one who knows what’s actually going on.

I did notice that the editing is a bit jumpy. Sometimes a kid is on one side of the room and then suddenly they are on the other with no explanation.

It’s a bit more chaotic and less creepy than Mickey's Initiation, which always felt a bit dark for a kid's short. This is just pure, bright mayhem.

The ending isn't really an ending. They just sort of finish the song and the movie stops.

It’s not trying to teach you a lesson. It’s not trying to be deep. It’s just kids being pests in a way that’s fun to watch from a distance.

I’d watch it again just for the Silver String Band segment. 🥁

Also, the way they use the microphones as props is pretty clever for 1934. You can tell they were having a blast breaking the studio equipment.

It's short, it's messy, and it’s a good reminder that kids haven't changed in a hundred years. They are still just loud and obsessed with making noise.