SUPER-HOOPER-DYNE LIZZIES (1925)
Short

Article 3658 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 8-5-2011
Posting Date: 8-20-2011
Directed by Del Lord
Featuring Billy Bevan, Andy Clyde, Lillian Knight
Country: USA
What it is: Car comedy

An inventor devises a way to run automobiles without gasoline, much to the chagrin of a gas merchant.

I almost reviewed an Andy Clyde short a few weeks back, but it turned out it wasn’t the movie I was looking for but just shared a title with it. So it’s nice to run into him again into this silent short, though Billy Bevan gets the lead listing. It’s a pretty bizarre comedy, and often very fun; my favorite sequence has the inventor’s assistant (Bevan) pushing a car with an empty gas tank home and inadvertently destroying several other cars in the process. On top of the science fiction aspects of the story, the short even ventures into horror territory when the gas merchant sneaks into the inventor’s house at night in order to destroy his machine, and then mistaking the inventor and his friends (who were at a costume party) as ghosts and demons. Sadly, this part of the short tries to get most of its laughs with the stereotypical “scared black man”, once again played by someone in blackface. And for those people who are up on their American history, they’ll get the joke of a character named “T. Potter Doam”.