Studio: Bray Productions
Distributor: Paramount Pictures (Paramount Bray Pictograph)
Short Synopsis
No detailed contemporary synopsis of this Bobby Bumps short has turned up, so this summary is based on the surviving film. Bobby Bumps and his dog Fido get into the circus, behind the scenes of the big top, where a keeper is tending an elephant with buckets beside him. Bobby is not there to watch; he is there to meddle. He wanders between the tent poles and props and tries out the equipment for himself, including a strongman's test-your-strength machine with a ball at the top of a tall post. As in most of the series, Bobby's curiosity sets off a chain of trouble involving the animals and the circus staff, and the film builds to a chaotic finish in which the scenery itself seems to come apart in a jumble of tumbling boards and canvas. The precise sequence of gags and the final outcome are not described in any source this book could check.
Why It Matters
- The scale contrast is the visual idea to watch for: Hurd sets his small, round-headed boy and stubby dog against the bulk of an elephant drawn as a solid dark mass, a striking use of the cel method, where moving characters sit on top of a detailed static background.
- The Bobby Bumps series was the first produced using the cel process that Earl Hurd patented in 1914 and pooled with J. R. Bray's patents. The pair licensed it to other studios until 1932, and the method remained standard through the classic studio era. Bray released the films through Paramount's Pictograph screen magazine, one of the main outlets that put cartoons in front of cinema audiences every week in the 1910s.
Notes and Trivia
- The series ran from 1915 to 1925, moving from Universal to Paramount and later to Educational Pictures.
- A 2019 Blu-ray, Cartoon Roots: Bobby Bumps and Fido, from the restorer Tommy José Stathes, collected fifteen shorts from the series.
- See also: Bobby Bumps and the Stork (1916).