Review of Rover's Big Chance

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.