Rover's Big Chance (1942) User Reviews

A different sort of Our Gang comedy

[dbborroughs · 5/10 · 11 November 2009]

Odd Our Gang film has a studio executive on the way to the studio getting a flat. As his car is being fixed he watches the baseball game going on and is taken by the gangs dog. Sensing he might be a star in the making he asks the kids to bring the dog to the studio and the result is craziness on the back lot.

I mentioned at the top that this is an odd film and in its way it is. A chunk of the film goes by at the start before the kids ever show up. We see a baseball game but never really become part of it and once the gang gets to the studio they seem to be one entity and not a bunch of characters. Its almost as if the script was brought in from some other series.

Its an odd short and a not very good one. Actually its more of interest for what its not than for what it is.

Rover had no chance.

[kpetnews · 3/10 · 10 March 2007]

There are only vague echoes of the real "Our Gang" in this short. Alas, the problem again is that the kids don't sell it too well anymore. Also, MGM's pacing leaves a lot to be desired. The film opens with a whole minute (out of ten) of the studio executive reading a script that has little or nothing to do with the short. Then the executive's car has a flat tire next to "the Our Gang's" baseball game. There are a couple of funny bits here and there, in the sense that you know someone thought it must have been humorous, even if it wasn't.

Then we get to the audition, and there's only one mild chuckle when a ventriloquist says "And I'm Rover!" Froggy eating dog biscuits SHOULD be funny, but the pacing is so off and Froggy's so sluggish that it doesn't come off well at all. Spanky's become so phony it's depressing, and, oh, is that Janet irritating.

What we have, in essence, is another dull and plodding bare-bones plot outline masquerading as entertainment. Thanks, MGM.

Rover's Big Chance wasn't as bad an Our Gang comedy as I had feared

[tavm · 4/10 · 1 February 2015]

This M-G-M comedy short, Rover's Big Chance, is the two hundred ninth entry in the "Our Gang" series and the one hundred twenty-first talkie. A casting director's car is forced to stop when a tire goes flat, just in time to catch Our Gang's baseball game and to see their dog Rover catch a ball. So he invites the gang to take Rover to the Mammoth Studios for a screen test. When the gang arrive, the dog has trouble with directions...Well, initially, I was gonna agree with Leonard Maltin and Richard W. Bann on their summary of their review of this short: "If this picture sounds dumb on paper, it's worse on film where its triteness really shines through." But after seeing Froggy take the dog biscuits to eat them before he and the gang enact a scene and then his final scene with the ventriloquist, I didn't think it was as bad as I feared. So on that note, Rover's Big Chance was an okay Our Gang comedy. P.S. Though I didn't notice him, that's Bobby Anderson-the future little George Bailey in my favorite movie, It's a Wonderful Life-hitting the ball in the baseball sequence. Also, Mickey Gubitosi would by this time be credited as Bobby Blake in features made outside of the series. And having the M-G-M Studios portrayed as the fictional Mammoth Studios here reminded me of the silent OG entry, Dogs of War, in which then-owner Hal Roach Studios was depicted as West Coast Studios there.

So goofy it managed to be funny!

[Moax429 · 8/10 · 19 October 2004]

"Rover's Big Chance" was a little more offbeat than most of the MGM-produced "Our Gangs," but it somehow managed to be funny, and, again, Leonard Maltin and Richard Bann's bashing of this short in their "Little Rascals" book made it even funnier.

What was especially funny was the scenes when Rover was on the baseball diamond and caught the ball in his mouth, prompting the casting director to call the dog "a good glove," and then the scenes inside the studio where Froggy attempts to "prime" Rover for the big scene (first, Froggy gets Spanky to act like a dog, and shortly thereafter Janet does an impression of a roaring fire while waving her arms in the air: "Ssssss! Crackle, crackle! Ssssss! Crackle, Crackle!").

As for Maltin and Bann's "dissing" of this short, they concluded the main review by saying "(T)he dog's career is over, and, mercifully, so is the short." Then they bemoaned how the "kids and pets" concept never took off at MGM, and that this film and "Doin' Their Bit" (the short made before this one) proved that "Our Gang" was suffering from a lack of quality writing and talent.

Well, Maltin and Bann, maybe *you* didn't like "Rover's Big Chance," but possibly that was the idea - it was so outrageously goofy it managed to be quite funny on its own (and certainly *much* funnier and *more decent* than today's "screwball" comedies)!

Also, Spanky McFarland appeared in two more shorts after this one and then left "Our Gang;" sadly, the series only had one more year to go (who in 1942 would have imagined that?). And veteran actor Stephen McNally (billed in MGM's press book as Horace McNally) played the director in this short.