User Reviews

Though all of "Hog Wild" is funny, it's the ending that leaves me helpless with laughter.

Since Mrs. Hardy wants to "get Japan" on her radio, Oliver and Stanley are planning to install an aerial on top of the house. You can guess the kinds of mishaps that follow.

Eventually, they decide to place the ladder on top of Stan's car. Bad idea. While Oliver is climbing the ladder, Stan mistakenly starts the car, and they go whizzing through the city streets. Stan cries, Ollie hangs on for dear life.

When they come up alongside a double decker bus, the women on the upper deck are stunned to see a man on a ladder going by. Oliver, ever the gentleman, tips his hat to them.

Well, eventually Oliver is safely on the ground, where his tearful wife informs him that she is crying not because of his horrible experience, but because the finance man has taken the radio away! Oliver squares his shoulders and resolutely marches over to the car where Stan waits.

The preceding is funny, but what's coming up is sublime. Stan can't get the car to start. He tinkers. He fidgets. He moves levers, including one that causes the car to backfire with a noise like a sonic boom. Oliver sits there expressionless, while his wife continues to cry over the loss of her radio.

Stan keeps working on getting the car to go, including blasting the horn several times. Multiple backfires ring out, to no avail.

No matter how many times I've seen this, I laugh myself silly. Stan is so willing to please but incapable, while Ollie is simply above it all as he sits wordlessly.

Eventually a streetcar bashes into them, crushing the car into a bizarre vehicle in which the front and back wheels almost touch. The streetcar conductor who has hit them doesn't ask if they are OK. Rather, in an enormous voice he roars for them to get out of the way! Ollie merely looks at him, and then silently motions for Stan to move along. And wonder of wonders -- the destroyed car starts on the first try. Stan signals that he is turning on to the road, toots the horn, and pulls out. Oliver is stoic. His necktie flaps in the breeze.

I love Laurel and Hardy, and I'm not sure I can explain why. Perhaps it's their undaunted spirit. In this case, they destroyed Oliver's house for nothing, since the radio was taken away. They now have a destroyed car, which ironically runs better now than it did when it was whole.

Stan has yet again helped to ruin everything that Oliver owned, but he is content to continue striving, even in a ravaged car that supposedly will take them back to the remnants of the Hardy house.

Meanwhile, Oliver has not a word to say. Broken, but not beaten.

The world is a better place because they lived.

. . . such chores as scraping paint and pulling weeds near Detroit. During the daytime he'd be listening to Tiger games (I'm not sure that they even had lights to host night games back then), but in the evening he could tune in AM radio stations from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago and Des Moines to hear what was happening around the whole Eastern half of the USA. HOG WILD takes place during the heyday of Grandpa's grandpa, when radios were NOT pocket-sized. Rather, they were Big Ticket items such as cars or trucks, as the repossession of the Hardy household squawk box proves.

The title is an absurdity. No hogs in sight. But it doesn't matter because the title might as well be as whimsical as the rest of the plot. Stan and Ollie are forced by Mrs. Hardy to install an aerial on the roof.

In the course of failing, they manage to fall off the roof several times.

The finale has them in a runaway car with Ollie stuck at the top of an upright ten-foot ladder.

It's amusing and up to their usual standard, but not funnier than that. I've seen a more comic episode dealing with a similar problem on "Married With Children." However, fans will get a big kick out of it.

This L&H talkie comedy short is available in its colorized, as well as B&W forms at YouTube. It's especially appropriate for those who like to see someone looking for their hat, which is on their head, and someone repeatedly falling off a roof, and an unconventional ride through traffic, to end up squashed between 2 trolleys. A don't mean to be sarcastic. These are funny or scary gags......Some reviewers wish the initial section, where Ollie is looking for his hat, which is on his head, had been deleted, as being too simple, too extended and not being related to the rest of the screenplay. However, I think Ollie does a fine job making it interesting, then with an unexpected twist at the end. I don't understand why the 2 women present: Fay Holderness as Mrs. Hardy, and Dorothy Granger, as the maid)didn't soon tell him it was on his head. I guess they just wanted to watch him struggle with the problem. ......Stan's car ultimately proved useful, acting as an extension of their ladder , to get to the roof. However, initially, its horn scares Ollie to fall from the ladder. Also, after parking it where Ollie wanted it, it let out a flaming backfire than singed Ollie's bottom, causing his pants to smoke. Stan got a bucket of water from the fish pond, but his aim was poor, mostly soaking the rest of Ollie. Ollie would get a much better taste of that water, several times, when he fell off the roof, trying to put up a large radio aerial. Of course, Stan 'helped' him in this project. The last time he fell from the roof, it was down the chimney after he had demolished the outer portion by tying a rope around it as a safety harness for himself. It didn't work. as the chimney was poorly made. After he got to the bottom, some of the 'bricks' fell on him.........Certainly, the scariest portion of the film is the last section, where Ollie is on top of the ladder, which is resting on Stan's runaway car. The car travels down various roads, seemingly driving itself, as Stan supposedly holds the ladder steady(Didn't know they had self- driving cars in those days?). If you think about it, this couldn't happen, as Stan would have to start the motor, and the accelerator would have to remain depressed after he took his foot off. Also, there is no way Stan could have steadied that ladder alone, with Ollie on the top. Totally illogical, but spectacular to watch........The final leg of the film has Mrs. Hardy catch up with the car, after Ollie fell off in front of a bus. She wanted to tell Ollie that the repossession man just took their radio: a deflating irony. Then, with the car parked on a trolley track, Stan can't get the motor started. Eventually, the car gets squashed between 2 trolleys (How does this happen?). We end up with a car squashed so that the passenger section is raised high above the rest, with the front and back axils much closer together than usual. Quite a sight, and apparently no one was injured, and the car now runs! ........ In 1932, the film "County Hospital," also ends with their car smashed between 2 trolleys. But, their car is not as spectacularly misshapen as in this film.

This is basically the essence of this Laurel & Hardy short film from 1930. it was made 85 years ago and it is one of their earlier sound films. The silent era was a thing of the past, bot not for really long at this point. However, it is still a black-and-white film. This movie runs for not even 20 minutes and was directed by the still pretty young James Parrott. He made many Stan & Ollie films, also many other movies and was one of the most prolific movie makers of his time. Hadn't he died in his early 40s already, he would have been even more prolific. And he was a talented actor too who appeared in over 100 movies. The writer is H.M. Walker and he worked on many Larel & Hardy films too. This short film here has a couple funny moments, but all in all not that many really. It's an okay watch once for fans of the duo, but the rest doesn't really need to watch it. Not one of their best in my opinion.

One of the team of Laurel and Hardy's most famous shorts hasn't lost its impact. It's 14 going on 90, funny to the kids who saw it in many of its incarnations (whether in the theater back in 1930, or in the 1970's when I saw it on TV), and as timely as ever. For those of us who can't understand modern technology, we can truly understand their obsession with trying to find a way to figure out these things on our own. In the case of L&H, it's about trying to hook up a radio antenna at Ollie's wife's demand. Even when she begins to realize that the destruction of her house is imminent, the wife wisely tells them not to bother. But, where there's a will, there's a way, and Oliver will get it up regardless of the bumps and bruises that he might get. This goes from bad to worse for them, ending up with laurel driving an out of control car with Oliver stuck on the back of the ladder. How they filmed these stunts remains a mystery, and its obvious to see why they have remained as potent in comedy as they are.