Another
win in my book. While on rewatch, I’d
say The Chemist isn’t as strong as Grand Slam Opera or Blue Blazes, it stills follows the main characteristics of those
shorts. It’s quite well-made, despite
the overall lack of budget/breathing space to work with in the Educational
stuff, it has a good many quality laughs, and you can feel Buster’s influence
on the comedy.
Buster
is an outside-the-box inventor looking to make good. His specialty is concocting special “powders”
that do all sorts of outlandish things, like instantly increase the
size/strength of any person or animal or, regrettably, cause immediate and
overwhelming attraction (to be fair to The
Chemist, it’s now 2016, and genre stories are still incorporating plots about “love” brought about by
supernatural/magic/sci-fi influences without acknowledging how creepy that it
from a consent standpoint.) His real
boon, though, is a just-add-water powder for noiseless explosions. The breakthrough earns him a lot of
attention, but – just his luck – it also catches the notice of a trio of crooks
who see the potential in easy, discreet safe-breaking. It takes all of Buster’s cunning to escape
the thieves and bring them to justice.
Some
great gags here. I love the opening
sequence with Buster’s laboratory breakfast (soft-boiling eggs in a beaker,
making toast over a Bunsen burner, etc.)
It’s a fun bit that feels at home next to the creative-cooking scenes in
films like The Scarecrow or The Navigator. I get a kick out of the sight gag of the
goldfish that, thanks to the enlarging/strengthening powder, gets swapped out
for an entirely, blatantly different kind of a fish but is still amusingly
passed off as the same animal.
It’s
also a good short for the ol’ Buster initiative. There’s his tenacity in cooking up crazy
ideas no one at his university believes in, and once he gets nabbed by the bank
robbers, he uses all sorts of imaginative techniques to challenge them. It doesn’t matter what obstacles Buster is
faced with. Be it a rival, a machine, an
army, a show of force by nature, or a herd of cattle, I just need him to be
resourceful in meeting the problem head-on – as long as he’s doing that, all is
right in the world.
My
absolute favorite example of that here comes when the thieves have chased
Buster back to his lab, where he locks himself inside and uses a neat bit of
foley artistry to convince them he has a gun.
I love this bit, because the creativity is so Buster, and yet, the very
sound-based nature of the comedy in this scene means it’s a type of gag we
really haven’t seen from him before. I
love watching him create the illusion of gunfire (under extreme pressure and
with limited resources, because how else does Buster do anything?) Seeing it, I always imagine it as an
indicator of what Buster’s sound career could have been like if he’d been able
to maintain creative control of his films, resulting in this very funny (if
somewhat wistful) might-have-been gag.
Warnings
Slapstick
violence, crime, and an unfortunate “love powder.”
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