Can You Imagine?

In the early 1930s, Vitaphone made a series of shorts featuring Robert Ripley. He would regale the audience with various about weird things around the globe...and would often draw pictures or show film footage. They made two dozen of them, so they must have been popular. Well, four years later, Vitaphone also made "Can You Imagine?"....a short that looked as if the studio was trying to reboot the Ripley series...just without Ripley!

In this film, you don't see the narrator. He introduces you to various unusual things...though they seemed more tame and less creepy than the Ripley stories. Include are the likes of a woman whose back is like a blackboard, various wood carvers, a tree growing out of a clock tower, a kid wrestling with a lion and more. None of these things seemed that usual or disgusting (like you'd often see in the Ripley films) but it was mildly enjoyable....but never led to more films like it for Vitaphone.

Totem poles, wooden clocks, and a tree growing out of a stone roof. What do these and other random facts about things in the US have in common? Not much, even though narrator Ray Saunders would have us believe otherwise, in this RIPLEY'S BELIEVE IT OR NOT knock-off.

THe subjects that are supposed to astonish us range from little girls who wash dogs for money to monkeys in a Milwaukee park. What's hard to imagine about this short subject is that anyone thought it worth putting it on their theater's screen.

This is a short about everyday American people and American places doing and being interesting things. It's a newsreel short. It's a series of short hits of less than a minute each. It's a time capsule despite the oddity of some of its subjects. America is in the depths of the Great Depression. This is obviously a lighter short trying to create ten minutes of diversionary fun. It mostly does that with some light wholesomeness. It's got monkeys.