Aaron1375
Usually these shorts from the 40's and 50's do one of two things. They tell the audience about problems and how to solve them or they advertise some sort of great product. Still others are cartoons and things like that which had to be the best of the stuff that proceeded a film. This one seems to be none of the above as old timer Billy Slater quickly reels in the children of his town and has a junior rodeo where a child could be horribly crippled or maimed. I laugh at the thought of something like this in the city where people sue when their child falls off a playground slide or something and breaks their arm. Here they could be paralyzed, I am quite sure the one girl who flew off the one animal and was walking very gingerly back to the sides was very hurt. So from what I saw this short was showing the great fun a town can have at a junior rodeo, well to each his own, but this did not look fun at all. Probably over 90 degrees outside and the smell of animals and their waste in the air, getting thrown violently to the ground if participating. Just nothing I see as a fun event and this short did not help the cause.
bensonmum2
Man, how times have changed! If you believe what you see in Junior Rodeo Daredevils, it seems that in the 1940s, any crazy stranger could take your kid, strap him/her to some sort of livestock, and watch them get thrown to the hard ground. Oh what fun - child abuse as entertainment! What parent wouldn't want a broken neck or a ruptured spleen for their child? Instead of being brought up on charges, Old-Timer Billy Slater gets to sit back and enjoy the sight of children having their necks snapped. It did my heart good to see this crazy old coot laugh like a hyena as one child after the next received severe head trauma. Yes, Junior Rodeo Daredevils is certainly one of the most demented sights I've ever seen.Mystery Science Theater 3000 did a wonderful job with this short. The riffing possibilities were abundant and the guys took full advantage. Much of it is laugh-out-loud funny. On my MST3K rating scale, Junior Rodeo Daredevils gets a 4/5.
lemon_magic
This is a very odd piece of pop culture detritus from the Encyclopedia Brittanica group. I'm not sure what the 'educational content' of this the film makers meant for us to draw from this short.Um...Rodeos are fun? Tying cans onto horses' tails results in punishment swift and certain? Old cowboys in Texas have too much time on their hands? Life in rural Texas is so desperately dull and suffocating that even an amateur rodeo looks good after a while? Being an orthopedic surgeon in a rodeo town is the surest path to riches? It isn't really all that bad, of course; it's just meandering and goofy. But you couldn't get kids in a modern classroom to watch something like this unless you swacked them into a low level hypnotic state with Thorazine beforehand. MST3K does a great job making fun of it, of course, and their version is probably the best for modern audiences to see.
Hancock_the_Superb
Well, another short torn to pieces by Mike, er, sorry, Joel and the Bots, this being one of their better works. Plot involves some old hick rancher forcing two mischievious kids to organize a junior rodeo ("We're doomed!" says Crow). Eventually, the whole town shows up just to get kicked, gored, and thrown to the ground by horses and bulls, while a narrator who sounds suspiciously like Henry Fonda (though fortunately isn't) muses over how fun it must be to be pummeled by these 1,000+ pound beasts (except the calves, of course). Ouch.
I find it kind of hard to criticize many MST3K shorts, since they tend to be educational films that, while corny, if nothing else show you a good depiction of what they're supposed to be telling you about. (Not to say the MST3K versions aren't funny . . .) This one, however, apparently was made for "entertainment" purposes, and should be missed - unless the SOL crew are doing it. I'm not going to rate the short itself, for the sole reason that I don't think I can. Ah, hell, let's give it 2/10. Nine stars for the hilarious MSTing, though.
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