Bear Knees

This was another entry in another Our Gang-inspired copy series, this time from Fox Films. Three men, one of them eventual Three Stooges stock player Bud Jamison, hide in a barn where an amusement park is held with various boys close to being teens and some animals are hanging around. These men are holding a rodeo nearby as a distraction for Jamison's men to rob a bank by taking the safe outside and putting it in the barn. I'll stop there and just mention there are plenty of funny physical gags involving those animals and the kids and other objects. In summary, Bear Knees is perhaps not great but quite good with what it had.

This is one of the many Fox short comedies issued during the silent era, all of which, save a vanishingly small number, are lost. This series is fairly close in broad outline to the original idea of Roach's 'Our Gang' with a bunch of kids and their various pets. It includes a Pete the Pup lookalike, battling a bunch of crooks following a robbery who are looking for a hide out, around a rodeo venue.

This one survives in a Kodascope cutdown, and the pace is timed to emphasize just the gags. There is a lot less kid stuff in this one than you'd get in a Roach Our Gang and much more well-directed slapstick around the adults, including Bud Jamison in silk hat and morning coat, whose cigar constantly gets busted. While no world-beater, particularly for those of us who love the Roach series, this is now a fine, high-speed short for those who want to see what the -- nowadays -- less available competition was doing.