The Big Paraders (1929) watch online HD

It's a troupe of six talented individuals. One plays the piano, another sings, the others dance in a high-kicking style. The gimmick is that they are all fat.

It's another of the seemingly innumerable shorts of the era in which a popular variety act was recreated on the sound stage. Some of them were excellent; Burns and Allen entered the movies through a series of comedy shorts. Some were excellent and led nowhere; Shaw and Lee's act brings down the house whenever their first comedy short is shown, and Ray Mayer and Edith Evan's cowboy pianist and singing lady is almost as good. Yet both acts went back on the stage.

And they had to build new routines. It might have taken years to write and refine a particular act, but once you performed it for the cameras, you had to start all over again. Even today, a stand-up comic who appears on one of the talk shows, blows years of material that he has been touring on for years. How much can one TV appearance pay to make that worthwhile.

I suppose they looked on it as an audition. Click in the shorts, and you could be as big as....whoever was popular at the moment.

As for this one, it's well performed, but the point of the short is that i is a gimmick and that doesn't make it of lasting value.

The Big Paraders is a musical short featuring overweight people singing and dancing. At first I was shocked that it seemed to exploit these peoples' weights, a no-no in today's society, but I was impressed with their talents, and especially the nimbleness of a few of them. There is an amusing and dated "collegiate" number where the dancers display a series of "modern" youthful dance moves wearing what at the time passed as college active wear. This film is available on Youtube and is worth seeking out.

I saw this screened at Capitolfest in 2017.

The Big Paraders (1929)

*** (out of 4)

"The Big Paraders," I'm guessing, get their name from the fact that the performers are quite heavy. The six-person act features one woman at the piano and then five different dancers who perform musical numbers, dances and various other acts. This short clocks in at just eight-minutes but it's certainly a lot of fun. I'm once again guessing that this act made their name on vaudeville by performing while being extremely heavy. This made their act all the more impressive because they certainly knew how to move whether it being keeping in step with each other or dancing around the stage. I was really impressed with their skill and there's no question that their act was a very entertaining one and one that would keep a smile on your face. The reason I love Vitaphone shorts can be found right here: This is the only film available of this team.