The Adventures of Pimple: The Battle of Waterloo

Ironically enough I saw this film screened with the remaining fragments of the 1913 British film "The Battle of Waterloo", which has almost totally been lost from the records. I say ironically because apparently the idea came from Pimple himself (Fred Evans) saw the original film, which was one of the new feature length epic films from the British producers and decided to cash in on its success by doing a mickey take of it. It was a good idea and it was well done and the resulting film is quite amusing and silly throughout. Hard to say how it compares to the film it is spoofing because it doesn't really exist any more but certainly approach seems to be the same as modern spoofs such as Scary Movie etc do by recreating the film but subverting it to make fun and get laughs at its expensive. Amusing little short film then – just a shame that the epic it is spoofing has been lost forever.

Once some films became well known, they were imitated - which was not intended as flattery so much as an attempt to get in on a good thing - and mocked. Many of Mack Sennett's Keystone comedies were burlesques of serious films directed by his former boss, D.W. Griffith.

This is a spoof of an early British epic film, THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO. Fred Evans did not have the resources that the makers of that 90-minute film did, so he made a virtue of that. Many of the gags involve the cheapness of the movie: Evans rides a pantomime horse, locations are indicated by signs, and one of the scenes is broken up by demonstrating suffragettes.

As a side note, the original film was long considered lost. 22 minutes were discovered in 2002. Keep looking for the rest of it!