User Reviews

I love many of Charley Bowers' films--in particular, his live-action films. However, despite my admiration for his creativity and exceptional use of stop-motion films, I cannot give this bizarre little film a glowing review. It is just too weird and too disjoint to love---and I tried!

The film consists of two main skits that go on and on and on. The first involves stop-motion peanuts that dance about as well as sprout limbs. The second, and strangest, consists of a lobster claw being used like a head on a rag doll. Again, like the peanut, there really isn't that much fun you can do with this. Sure, the cars hatching from eggs was a bit cute--but it was also used before in Bowers' EGGED ON--and used much better.

All in all, not a particularly professional looking or interesting film--just weird and inclined to make most viewers just scratch their heads in disbelief.

By the way, unlike many of his films, this one is a sound film and I assume the narrator is Charley--but it doesn't seem to indicate this on IMDb.

From the always feverishly cartoon mind of Charley Bowers comes one of his few sound films, a burlesque of the Ripley's Believe It Or Not cartoon strip -- Ripley also appeared in a couple of series of movies doing his drawings.

But the point of this review is to tell you about Charley Bowers, who led a weird life and wound up in the movies, first directing Mutt & Jeff cartoons and then starring in some stop-motion films towards the end of the silent era in which weird and weirder things happened. Then he disappeared, raising his head up two or three times for movies like this one and WILD OYSTERS in 1940.

The three subjects in this short concern circus peanuts, autos that lay eggs or perhaps vice versa and a boiled lobster. Has to be seen to be be believed, and even then you don't.