Skippy (1931)
The little comic strip movie that turned me into a sobbing mess. Calvin & Hobbes better never get adapted into a movie I stg
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Skippy (1931) - watched 8/7/24
Director: Norman Taurog
Writers: Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Sam Mintz
Starring: Jackie Cooper, Robert Coogan, Mitzi Green, Jackie Searl
Available to watch? Not currently available to stream or rent.
First Time Watch? Yes
Okay… WHOMST gave this movie the RIGHT? The AUDACITY??
All Quiet on the Western Front was the first film I watched for this project that made me shed a few tears. This is a documented fact that I’m okay with sharing. A few individual tears rolling down my cheeks, accompanied by some sniffles. Nothing crazy!
Skippy, to my absolute shock and amazement, is the first film I’ve watched so far for this project to make me all-out bawl. I mean, I was CRY-ING. For several minutes! Across multiple scenes! I was still all sniffly and snotty in the aftermath, long after the movie ended! I was so emotionally drained that I had to take a nap!!
If you’re like me—and since it’s mostly my buddies and pals reading this, it’s extremely likely that you are like me—then you’re probably a sweetie with very specific sensitivities when it comes to movies. In most cases, let’s say, you’re probably less affected by a human death in a film than an animal death.
This is where I provide a gentle warning that the plot of Skippy, a film that I expected to be a Little Rascals-esque, cute, breezy film suitable for kids, involves the death of a pet. I was fully not expecting this and it caught me so off guard that even now, as I’m writing this the day after I’ve watched it, I still haven’t fully recovered from the emotional toll. I just really love my dog and if any harm ever came to her it would break me into a billion pieces, okay?
It’s not graphic by any means—we don’t see the death happen, which is a positive. But it was still a shocking development, and the emotions of the characters involved were so real and so deep (more on that later) that it still left a pretty dramatic impact on me. But then again—I’m an extremely sensitive person when it comes to these things. Your mileage may vary.
I can get away with anything in my house, because I’m nervous and high-strung!
We meet Skippy (Jackie Cooper) as he lies in bed, avoiding getting dressed and going down to breakfast, despite his mother’s (Enid Bennett) warnings. It’s finally the stern voice of his health inspector father (Willard Robertson) that gets Skippy out of bed and ready for the day. We get the sense from his parents that Skippy is a bit of a handful, but by 1930s standards that could probably mean anything. At breakfast, Skippy starts talking about the flowers he saw in Shantytown, a neighboring town that’s largely run down and populated by poor families. His father scolds him for going there, and forbids him from ever going back, claiming that Shantytown is too germy. First of all, what? And second of all, huh?
Skippy goes against his father’s command, because fuck that, and goes to Shantytown later that day with his friend Sidney (Jackie Searl). In Shantytown, Skippy meets a young boy named Sooky (Robert Coogan), and saves him from a fight with the local bully, Harley Nubbins (Donald Haines). Skippy and Sooky become instant besties, probably because their names sound so nice together, and Sooky takes Skippy to his house in Shantytown to meet his beloved dog, Penny. We learn that soon everyone in Shantytown will be evicted, their houses demolished to clean up the dirty, impoverished town. Sooky also tells Skippy that Penny needs to be hidden because they don’t have a license for him, as dog licenses were extremely expensive at $3 a pop, and Sooky and his mother simply couldn’t afford it.
One day while playing, the boys accidentally break the car windshield of Mr. Nubbins (Jack Rube Clifford), the town’s dog catcher and Harley’s father. It was actually Harley who did it, but Skippy and Sooky more or less begrudgingly accept responsibility for it, knowing how badly Mr. Nubbins would likely abuse Harley if he found out the truth. Mr. Nubbins tells the kids that they’re going to pay for the windshield.1
Later, Sooky’s dog Penny is captured by Mr. Nubbins. When the kids attempt to get Penny out of the pound, they discover this would also be very expensive to do—another $3. They manage to gather the money by sneaking into his bank at home, which for some reason his parents had forbidden him to take money from. It’s his money, jerks!! Anyway, Skippy and Sooky take the $3 back to Mr. Nubbins, who informs them that this money only covers replacing his windshield. They’ll need to bring him another $3 for the dog, or else they’ll euthanize him. Geez, okay man, way to raise the stakes!!
Over the next couple of days, Skippy and Sooky raise money by selling bottles and loads of wood, setting up a lemonade stand, and staging an impromptu performance for the local kids. They’re 30 cents shy of the 3 dollars, and Skippy goes to his father as a last-ditch effort to get the remaining money. His father doesn’t went to give him the 30 cents, because he sucks. The boys go back to Mr. Nubbins with the money that they have, and promise to bring him the remaining 30 cents as soon as they can. Mr. Nubbins tells them that they’re too late—he already shot and killed Penny.
At this point I was like… this had better be a cruel joke, because my heart can’t take it otherwise. But Mr. Nubbins sure wasn’t lying—Penny was gone. And Mr. Nubbins justified it by saying he was only following the law, gesturing to a signed declaration hanging up on the wall behind him. Through teary eyes, Skippy looks at the document, and sees his father’s signature at the bottom of the paper—his father, of all people, was the one who signed off on this law.
Skippy and Sooky are inconsolable—just an endless amount of devastated sobs. When his father asks what’s wrong, Skippy lays all the blame on him, and rightly so!! His father is remorseful, and the following day we see he has attempted to make things right—he gets a new dog for Sooky, gives Sooky’s mother a job, and stops the demolition of Shantytown. Walking through Shantytown with the boys, they stop to play a game of fetch with the dogs. Skippy’s father throws a stick that ends up crashing through Mr. Nubbins windshield again. Then the two men get into a very random, extremely abrupt fight that ends immediately, with Skippy’s father as the victor. And I guess that means he’s a good father after all! Haha wow!!
Well, we all gotta be prompt at our job, and my job is to get up early in the morning.
I think one of the saddest things a child can experience2 is having their voices go unheard.
We’re always told, as children, that when we need help, we should seek out a trusted adult. As adults, we have to reckon with the fact that we often fail the kids in our lives when it comes to this. Because adults are busy or distracted. Because children’s desires can sometimes seem frivolous to us. Because we’ve set up arbitrary rules that prevent us from giving children what they want. Because sometimes we just don’t want to.
We teach kids that the moral of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” is “don’t lie. And yes, absolutely, teaching kids not to lie is valuable. But even when a kid is mischievous, or they exaggerate, or they’re kind of a pain in the ass, or they’re extra fearful and sensitive, they deserve to be heard and have their needs met.
In a way, the plight of Skippy reminded me a lot of one of my favorite films, 1987’s Where is the Friend’s House? by Abbas Kiarostami. Just like with Skippy, Friend’s House has a simple premise—a boy (Babek Ahmed Poor) is searching for the home of a classmate so that he can give him his notebook that he took by mistake. He fears that his friend will get kicked out of school if he doesn’t have his notebook back in time for class. Along the way, the boy is constantly scolded and dismissed, all of the adults unable or at times flat-out refusing to help him, even though he is just trying to do the right thing. These adults in the boy’s life are more interested in teaching him lessons and ordering him around rather than listening to what he has to say, or what he’s trying to achieve. The film sends a clear message that to adults, obedience takes precedence over morality.
More than fifty years prior to Friend’s House, we’re seeing a similar theme with Skippy. Skippy is constantly trying to get the attention of his parents, who brush off his curiosity, and consider him to be spoiled and prone to mischief. His father, a real NIMBY asshole, spends the first half of the movie denigrating Shantytown and the impoverished people who live there, calling them dirty and forbidding Skippy from playing there. Skippy is scolded from attempting to access his own money that he keeps in a bank, never bothering to just ask the kid why he needs the money in the first place. Skippy is often treated like a nuisance, an annoying little fly, by his own father. And when the worst case scenario happens, Skippy is crushed, and betrayed. He knows that if somebody had just listened, if somebody had cared, they could have saved Penny.
And then we have 1999’s Magnolia, another one of my all-time favorite movies. One of the film’s many interconnected storylines involves a boy named Stanley (Jeremy Blackman). Stanley is a genius who is about to break the record for his winning streak on the fictional game show What Do Kids Know? After the show has started (and it’s aired live, mind you) Stanley lets a production coordinator know that he needs to go to the bathroom. The commercial breaks aren’t long enough for Stanley to take a bathroom break, I guess, so they continually dismiss Stanley and prevent him from going to the bathroom. Eventually, after multiple attempts pleading with any adult who would listen, Stanley can’t hold it anymore and he wets himself onstage. Too embarrassed, too rattled, too exhausted from the pressure to perform and win, Stanley is unable to answer any of the random obscure trivia questions. Everyone who has a stake in Stanley’s success—the producers, his teammates, his father—are furious, asking why he peed his pants.
Well, gee, I wonder why.
We later see Stanley stick up for himself, calling out everyone in the room who had failed him, on live television. In his last scene, Stanley goes to his dad while he’s sleeping and tells him, “You need to be nicer to me.” I want this level of courage for every kid.
Clearly this is a theme that we, as former children, are eager to explore and understand, but are we doing anything to change? Are we listening to children more?
Realizing what was happening to Skippy made his plight all the more heartbreaking to watch. Even more than the death of Penny itself (which was, of course, devastating), I was moved to damn near unstoppable tears watching Skippy’s reaction to it, witnessing his pain. Jackie Cooper’s performance is gut-wrenching in these moments. As a kid who often felt unheard, misunderstood, and not protected, his pain was very familiar to me. The worst part is knowing that his pain in this instance was entirely preventable.
And Jackie Cooper’s emotions in these scenes were, infuriatingly, very real. Norman Taurog, the director and Jackie’s uncle, pulled this performance out of the poor kid by telling him that they were going to actually shoot the dog—and the dog was Jackie’s dog in real life! Taurog instructed someone on set to take the dog behind a truck and fire a gun with a blank in it, a very cruel and convincing trick that made Jackie Cooper so upset that he couldn’t stop crying long after the scene was shot, even after he knew that his dog was okay. Call me crazy but I don’t think purposely inflicting trauma on a nine-year-old should have been rewarded, here. Thinking about how Jackie Cooper must have felt in that moment, the level of betrayal from someone in his family—let me just say I think hell is probably too cushy of a place for Norman Taurog and leave it at that.
Whew, okay. I need to breathe for a second. 😮💨
Fortunately, the movie isn’t all gloom—there were some moments that I thought were genuinely funny or sweet. There’s one scene in particular, where Skippy is asking his father questions while he takes a shower, that cracks my ass up. His father can’t hear Skippy well over the sound of the running water, so Skippy has to keep repeating his questions, louder and louder. It’s so simple, but effective. There’s a funny way that Skippy bobs his head every time he has to raise his voice, as if the motion will naturally bump up the volume for him. Jackie Cooper, while a bit of a precocious little stinker, is a charming child actor and he has very natural comedic timing and sensibilities.
The ending felt a little rushed and cobbled together—I also think the movie lets Skippy’s dad off the hook a little too easily. On the one hand, hey, at least he’s not physically abusive like Mr. Nubbins is. But he’s still an elitist asshole who almost displaced an entire town of people because he thinks poors are unhygienic. The fact that it took his kid crying uncontrollably to make him realize this was a bad thing to do doesn’t make him a good guy! He didn’t do it to save those people, he did it to save his relationship with his son! And he shouldn’t have tried to evict them in the first place!!
In conclusion—adults are selfish messes. And kids literally already know everything. I’m no expert but I think we might all be better off if we let go of the idea of children as objects we need to control and form, and accept that they are also people, people who have wants and needs and who deserve to be heard and respected. Kind of sounds like a no-brainer as I’m typing it out, but as these all-too relatable stories show us, it’s something that many adults could stand to learn. These kids deserved better, our kids now deserve better. And we did, too.
What kind of thoroughbred is he? — He’s an all-around thoroughbred.
Quick Facts:
Nominated for 4 Academy Awards, won 1
Best Picture
Best Director (Norman Taurog, won)
Best Actor (Jackie Cooper)
Best Adaptation (Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Sam Mintz)
Director Norman Taurog, at age 32, was the youngest person to win Best Director, up until Damien Chazelle won in 2017 for La La Land. The current record for youngest Best Director nominee is held by John Singleton, at age 24, for Boyz n the Hood (1991).
The $3 dog license is equivalent to about $59.28 in 2024 money
At age 9, Jackie Cooper set the record for the youngest person to be nominated for Best Actor. He was the youngest to be nominated in any category until Justin Henry was nominated in 1979 for Kramer vs. Kramer. Tatum O’Neal still holds the record for the youngest person to win an acting Oscar, for Paper Moon (1973).
Stray Observations:
Skippy keeps a pet turtle named Lindy in a small tin with him at all times. Cute but also concerning? I am worried for this turtle?
Skippy really doesn’t seem all that naughty, I don’t know what all the fuss is.
Sooky introducing himself by repeating his name three times, sounding more defeated each time, was one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen.
Skippy tries throughout to convince himself that his dad is a good guy—sad!
WHY did this EVISCERATE me??
Skippy trying to cheer up Sooky, even while he is also in immense pain, is so sweet and endearing and my heart can’t take it.
I am SOBBING.
I am not okay!!!
My Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️½
Next Up: Trader Horn (1931)
Literally how are they supposed to do that, they’re children!! Call the parents and make them pay for it, idiot!
Aside from, you know, the sudden and extremely preventable death of a pet