This was another early Scrappy cartoon from Charles Mintz of Columbia Pictures. In this one, mad scientist Hugo Plotz experiments on the boy character in a water bowl by first turning him into a fish and then an old man. When his little brother comes in, Hugo then turns them into babies. And then when they go back to normal, they travel into the future, all the way to 1990. There they encounter people in propeller hats and attempt to rescue a girl from Plotz. I'll stop there and just say this was a fascinating look at designs that were meant to make technological advances look wonderful not to mention a cartoon version of the Fox film Just Imagine. Or so I read. Anyway, I heartily recommend The Great Experiment.
3 Reviews
Starts out strongly, then becomes uneven with a predictable finish
llltdesq17 May 2015
Warning: Spoilers
This is one of the cartoons from the Scrappy series produced by Charles Mintz for Columbia. There will be spoilers:
I'm not a big fan of Scrappy (he's too often an obnoxious jerk for my tastes) but this cartoon started out well and is a reasonably good short, despite its petering out over the last half or so.
The short opens with a shot of the door to the lab of one "Hugo Plotz". We then enter to see Plotz pouring liquid from one beaker to another for a bit. We then see that Plotz has Scrappy in a glass container. Scrappy tries to escape, only to be injected by Plotz and change into a fish, which isn't what Plotz wants. Scrappy changes back and the footage of him trying to escape is used again, he's injected again and becomes an old Scrappy. Scrappy's brother tries to rescue him, is caught and they're both injected with something which turns them into babies, which is what Plotz wants.
Here, the short goes off the rails a bit, as we see a scroll of dates go by, from 1940 to 1990. We then see Scrappy and his brother in a futuristic setting, but the "futuristic" part is limited to basically one major innovation, with every other aspect looking like the 1930s lifted into 1990.
We even see an older version of Plotz (who apparently declined to use his own serum) chasing a little girl. Much of the latter half of the short consists of Plotz chasing Scrappy. A few of the gags are enjoyable, but the cartoon goes nowhere after the flash forward. The ending is trite and predictable.
Worth watching at least once.
I'm not a big fan of Scrappy (he's too often an obnoxious jerk for my tastes) but this cartoon started out well and is a reasonably good short, despite its petering out over the last half or so.
The short opens with a shot of the door to the lab of one "Hugo Plotz". We then enter to see Plotz pouring liquid from one beaker to another for a bit. We then see that Plotz has Scrappy in a glass container. Scrappy tries to escape, only to be injected by Plotz and change into a fish, which isn't what Plotz wants. Scrappy changes back and the footage of him trying to escape is used again, he's injected again and becomes an old Scrappy. Scrappy's brother tries to rescue him, is caught and they're both injected with something which turns them into babies, which is what Plotz wants.
Here, the short goes off the rails a bit, as we see a scroll of dates go by, from 1940 to 1990. We then see Scrappy and his brother in a futuristic setting, but the "futuristic" part is limited to basically one major innovation, with every other aspect looking like the 1930s lifted into 1990.
We even see an older version of Plotz (who apparently declined to use his own serum) chasing a little girl. Much of the latter half of the short consists of Plotz chasing Scrappy. A few of the gags are enjoyable, but the cartoon goes nowhere after the flash forward. The ending is trite and predictable.
Worth watching at least once.
Great Start
boblipton31 July 2009
I am not a fan of the Scrappy series of cartoons made for Columbia from 1931 through 1941. They seem made for small children without a clear understanding of what children find interesting.
This one, however, starts off with an extravagantly terrifying opening as Scrappy finds himself in a laboratory, where a scientist keeps injecting him with serums, changing him into various weird life forms. The dark ambiance and better-than usual in-betweening lend an eerie air of nightmarish reality to the entire proceedings.
Unfortunately, the second half of the cartoon moves into a science-fictional but relatively banal story in which Scrappy and a bad guy chase each other around for a while. So this is not a great cartoon, but for those first three minutes it is first rate.
This one, however, starts off with an extravagantly terrifying opening as Scrappy finds himself in a laboratory, where a scientist keeps injecting him with serums, changing him into various weird life forms. The dark ambiance and better-than usual in-betweening lend an eerie air of nightmarish reality to the entire proceedings.
Unfortunately, the second half of the cartoon moves into a science-fictional but relatively banal story in which Scrappy and a bad guy chase each other around for a while. So this is not a great cartoon, but for those first three minutes it is first rate.
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