MOOM PITCHER REVIEW! TABLE, DONKEY AND STICK (Germany 1956, released in the USA 1967)
Here's a Something Weirditie sent by Bill Shute for who knows what reason...I get the feeling that when Bill was a mere kiddie his mom stuck him in a theatre showin' this woofer just so she'd get some shopping done in peace without any of that "Mom, buy me THIS thing!" stuff 'n Bill figures why should he be the only one to suffer! A K. Gordon Murray presentation, TABLE, DONKEY AND CHAIR's a rather flipazoid German-filmed rendition of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale I never heard about done in rhyme and with at least two rather startling scenes that'll have you doin' more'n a li'l double-taking...'n after sittin' through this 'un all I gotta say is it's amazing what they actually put into some of these kiddie films way back inna fifties, or I guess that Germans just have a different sense of scatological values than us clean Amerigan types.
Dunno if you are familiar with the tale, but it has something to do with the three sons of a tailor who are chased away from home because of a nasty nanny goat who, when it is discovered that she lied about the lads not feeding her, is also run outta burgh by a rather pee'd tailor. All three sons become apprentences and, thanks to their hard work and diligence learning their trades receive magic gifts. One is rewarded a table on which food magically appears, while the other obtains a sack which contains a long stick which, on command, flies outta the bag to beat the bejabbers outta wrongdoers. And the third gets a donkey which, when mystical words are spoken, not only pukes but defecates gold coins, nuggets and dust all over the place! I mean it...and although you don't actually see the particles of valuable metal coming directly outta the donkey's anus you do get a shot of the gold stuff being sprayed out in high fiber fashion. And really, I can empathize with the ol' animal considering some of the weird food I've been eating as of late!
Leave it to K. Gordon Murray to take this old kraut flick 'n re-package it for Amerigan consumption, and yeah, I can see throngs of bored stiff kids on a Saturday afternoon watching this at some long-gone downtown cinema thinkin' they coulda gone across the street to see GODZAPPA EATS YOUR MOTHER if they were only cagey enough. Well, at least these kids were privvy to some scenes showing a donkey spraying a load of gold outta his hindquarters which musta gotten the entire lot of 'em hootin' and hollerin' like nothing outside of a kill whitey movie in some urban enclave. And hey, I couldn't think of a better Sunday afternoon recover from Saturday night UHF wonder than this, which I wouldn't doubt actually made it to some of the smaller stations extant back in the seventies during a time when it seemed that a good fiftysome years of filmed culture was being presented to us, and at rapid pace at that!
As a bonus, Something Weird added a whole buncha kiddie trailers at the end, and boy were some of 'em pretty ugsville! I guess it didn't take much for Murray to get hold of some European kiddie film and repackage it for the local market, but some of the domestic affairs that were offered look just about one step above of a locally-produced television commercial or one of those cheap 15 minute educational classroom television programs that your local PBS station used to run during the school year! I undoubtedly would have loved to have seen some of these films such as the one (presumably lost) with Santa and Whizzo the Clown if only they were being shown on television when I was three, so maybe these flybynight operators did have more of an idea as to what would zing the kiddies than most of the "respectable" members of the entertainment media ever would!
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