User Reviews

FitzPatrick's "Traveltalks" series of shorts seem pretty quaint today. What seemed like exotic and rare glimpses into foreign lands when this episode came out in the mid-thirties could not keep the attention of a ten year old today. With 200 channels being funneled into most homes, you're bound to find exotic lands on a few of them at any given time.

This one is in Technicolor, which helps, but FitzPatrick's recitation of the facts comes across as something akin to verbal Wikipedia.

At just eight minutes long you'd think they would try to cram in all they could on these two locations, yet we're subjected to about a minute of a guy on a ship, traveling between the islands, diving into the ship's pool and a bunch of women climbing a ladder to get out of the pool. Made no sense at all. Maybe that was fascinating too, in the 30's.

As these things go, this one is about average, but a few minutes watching the Travel channel would probably be more interesting. Can be seen now and again as one of TCM's vast array of little time killers.

Traveltalk travels to Madagascar and the Seychelles Islands. It's interesting that this one starts off with a map. There isn't much to the Madagascar stop other than the narration hinting at some anti-colonial troubles. There is an obsession with the rickshaw. The Seychelles look like a tropical paradise. As always, there is the listing of the races. All in all, it's a beautiful postcard but not much more.

James A. Fitzpatrick sends the Technicolor cameras to the Indian Ocean so he can take pictures of the swimming pools on cruise ships and babble of spiders' intelligence and how most rickshaws are manufactured in Connecticut in this lackluster Traveltalks.

If you've read more than a couple of my reviews for this series of travelogues, you are aware that I think they mostly have good pictures, but that Fitzpatrick's narration is foolish and shouted. This one, however, has a shortage of interesting pictures in it. Mostly we get pictures of natives downtown in the port cities, and we are treated to a long look at the young women around the aforementioned swimming pool. Fitzpatrick, in the meantime, tells us random facts, as usual. This time, however, he does not shout. That's something, I suppose.

Colorful Islands Madagascar and Seychelles (1935)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

This TravelTalks episode takes us to a couple islands on the coast of Africa. In Madagascar we learn that there are about three and a half million people living there (at least in 1935) and how the place actually features a lot of women in power, which wasn't the norm for this type of country back then. We also learn that France took the place over in 1896 and that in 1916 many people were arrested for a plot to poison all French people living there. We learn that rice, coffee and salt are the main exports. In Seychelles we learn about their colorful spiders that are apparently very dumb as well as their double coconuts. The actual stories being told here are fairly interesting and I certainly would have liked to had heard more about that 1916 poisoning case but the real reason to check this out is for the Technicolor and some of the amazing shots. There's a scene towards the end where we see the skies sitting over the beach and I must say this was perhaps the most breathtaking images I've seen from the several dozen TravelTalks shorts I've seen.