Robot Wrecks

Our Gang is at a department store watching a robot demonstration. The robot, Volto, pushes a lawn mower around. The kids decide to make their own robot. Slicker tricks the kids and sells them a box of invisible rays. Slicker's friend Boxcar had put on the robot costume and pretended to make it work.

It's an Our Gang short. It's not anything special but it has an easy charm. I don't know why a department store would do a fake demonstration of the robot. Are they selling robots? The demonstration should have been about the appliances. The robot should have been a side show. Quite frankly, it should have been a giant rudimentary toy robots. The presenter could get frustrated with Our Gang and kick them out of the store. That would be a good catalyst for them to make their own robot. The rest is good kiddie fun.

ROBOT WRECKS is a mediocre entry in the "Our Gang" series, made during the declining years of the once excellent short comedies. The aging "second generation" cast members look awkward, particularly Spanky McFarland, who is really too old to portray a kid. The plot is according to a well-worn formula, with the gang building their own backyard version of something they have seen. It's all familiar, with predictable results. The studio was trying to introduce another new generation of child actors to the series during this time period, but the originality of the characters seen in the earlier films just wasn't there. The best examples of the earlier films (1930's era) featured the gang doing their thing without any adult presence in evidence. The 1940's films are full of adult characters, and their presence is a big detraction. If you want to catch the true peak of the series, watch the films made from 1929 through the mid 1930's, and don't bother with later series entries.

Robot Wrecks should have been a great Our Gang entry--- the basic idea of building kid's robot slave in the days soon after the World of Tomorrow sounds pretty cool. Alas, sounds can be deceiving. Robot Wrecks blows the premise by bastardizing the robot by stuffing it with Billy Ray "Boxcar" Smith and allegedly fueling it with "invisible rays" and then selling it to one of their usual foes, Freddie "Slicker" Walburn (who's atypically gullible here). Voices are obviously dubbed, the acting is excruciating to watch and the only remotely funny aspect is that the writers could get even kids to recite the dialog (blame Hal Law and Robert A. McGowan). Sadly, future MGM Our Gangs would rival this deplorable production. If I could give this less than 0 stars I would.

It's kind of neat that when kids see something they find fascinating, they decide to duplicate it, in their own kid way. Here it is a robot that catches their eyes. They decide they can gather some junk and make their own. Soon, one of the older kids gets the idea of conning them into thinking they can sell an invisible substance that will make the mechanical man work. Of course, Boxcar, the toady to the big guy, is inside and he goes berserk. They are made to pay a price and shown that what they did was lazy. Actually, what they did was creative and imaginative, even though they got bilked.

Let me explain....

The Gang had previously encountered Slicker as a bully in "Fightin' Fools" and now faces him as a con man who sells them "invisible rays" to help them make their robot work. Is the Gang that gullible? (And Spanky, the unofficial leader of the Gang, is 13-years-old! Surely, he would have had more intellectual sense!)

That having been said, this film is rather fun. As the Gang builds and tests their robot, they copy some of the same things they witnessed in a previous labor-saving robotics demonstration (they even mimic the famous line: "Robot, do you feel in condition to go to work?").

Even more fun is to be had. Slicker enlists a friend of his to step inside the robot, and fool the Gang into believing their endeavor was successful. When the robot is instructed to mow Froggy's lawn, he does more than that --- he mows down flowers and vegetables, turns over wheelbarrows, and flings newspapers all over the yard. All filmed at double-speed!! It's really cool to watch.

Sadly, what is less fun is when Froggy's dad gives the kids a lecture on personal responsibility (such is often the case in MGM Our Gang films). This lecture is then followed by one of Froggy's lame Aunt Minnie quotes at the end of film: "Never put off till tomorrow what you should have done yesterday!" (this, of course, in inexplicably followed by raucous laughter from the Gang).

An interesting side note is that Billy Bletcher, the actor who played Froggy's father, is the guy who provided voices for some of the Warner Brothers cartoons (probably most notably as Henry, the grouchy father bear). His natural baritone voice made him the perfect actor to play Froggy's father. In fact, in an amusing throw-away gag, he even provided a dubbed voice for Froggy's mother!

In sum, this is a reasonably enjoyable film that could have been even more so if the writers didn't feel the need to moralize near the end. One more thing: is it really necessary to end an MGM short with a contrived joke that produces forced laughter at the end?

Just a thought.