Pettin' in the Park Review: Why Are These Birds Swimming So Fast?

If you have about ten minutes to spare and love digging up weird, dusty relics from the start of the sound era, this is absolutely worth your time today. But if you hate scratchy audio and people singing like their lives depend on it, you will probably want to throw your screen out the window.

Pettin' in the Park is basically a bizarre little musical short from a time when movie studios were just throwing literally anything at the wall to see if it would stick. The whole setup is incredibly simple: a bunch of birds are having a swimming contest in a park pond.

But the way they filmed it is just so chaotic and strange. The Rhythmettes does some harmony stuff that sounds like it was recorded inside a giant soup can, but honestly, I kind of loved how raw it was.

It reminded me of watching other unpolished oddities from that same era, like Headin' Home where you can just feel the filmmakers figuring out how a camera works in real time. There is no polish here, just pure, frantic energy.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Pettin' in the Park (1934) through its definitive frames.

Some weird things I noticed while watching:

• The pond water looks incredibly gray and thick, like nobody has cleaned it since 1910. 🤢
• One duck seems to be actively cheating during the race but the referee bird does nothing.
• The Varsity Three have these intense, wide-eyed expressions where they look like they are trying to hypnotize the lens.

There is a moment where a goose does this weird little wiggle in the water. The camera just stares at it for a solid five seconds without cutting away, and it made me laugh out loud because of how awkward the silence was.

Unlike something with actual dramatic tension like The Third Degree, this short is just pure, silly novelty. It does not try to be art, which is probably why it is still sort of fun to watch now.

I wonder what writer Tom Armstrong was thinking when he pitched this. "Yes, the public is definitely demanding swimming birds this year."

Honestly, he was not entirely wrong. It is a lot more entertaining than some of the dry, boring stuff from that decade like Sunset Pass which just seems to drag on forever.

It is cheap, it is noisy, and the print is so blurry you can barely tell the ducks apart from the geese. But it has this weird, ghostly charm that you just do not get with modern stuff.