CheerupSilver
Very Cool!!!
Cathardincu
Surprisingly incoherent and boring
FirstWitch
A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.
bensonmum2
One Got Fat is a bicycle safety video. In the short, a group of "kids" plan to ride their bikes nine blocks for a picnic. One kid has a large basket – big enough to hold everyone's lunch. The title refers to the one kid who actually made it to the picnic without having an accident or something else stop him. He ate all the lunches and got fat. The children who don't make it to the picnic are all dressed in monkey masks. The moral is don't be a monkey – practice safety when riding your bike.One Got Fat is especially creepy and dark. The frozen-face monkey masks are the stuff of nightmares. It doesn't help that just before each child has an accident, their eyes bulge out of the mask. It's quite a sight. As for dark, the whole premise of the video is that nine kids don't make it to the picnic. They're hit by cars, run over by road equipment, slam into pedestrian, or suffer some other horrifying accident. All the while, we hear the bright, chipper voice of Edward Everett Horton narrating events. Horton's melodious style is a stark contrast to the images on the screen. It's a bizarre experience. Was One Got Fat effective? Yes. While it may take it's time getting the message out, I don't think anyone who watches this would forget basic bicycle safety. Was One Got Fat entertaining? In a weird way, it was. It's not a laugh a minute, but it's hard to turn away from the surrealistic images on-screen. I'm giving it an 8/10.
classicsoncall
If it was 1963 and I were watching this I would have believed it was made fifty years earlier. But I was twelve years old that year and I don't recall watching anything as remotely goofy as this. I certainly would have been a prime candidate for the safety message here as my friends and I took our bikes everywhere, but I don't think any of us would have been able to stop laughing at the total absurdity of this flick. It might have passed muster as a message film if they dispensed with the monkey masks and spring tails, but looking like these bikers just hailed from the Planet of the Apes was just asking for trouble. If it were worth the time I'd walk through each of the potential dangers these kids faced but reviewers 'ethylester' and 'dmanyc' have already done that, so check those out if need be. The one that really baffled me was making sure your bike was licensed and registered. With who? Is that required today? I might need a refresher course on bicycle safety. Is One Got Fat any relation to Yun Fat Chow?
Edgar Allan Pooh
. . . is patterned after the classic Agatha Christie story (and corresponding films) sometimes titled AND THEN THERE WERE NONE (a.k.a., TEN LITTLE INDIANS, a.k.a., TEN LITTLE N-words). We see approximately ten members here of a local Ride Your Bike While Wearing a Monkey Mask Club setting off for a picnic. Naturally, the nerdy boy who follows all the rules has the biggest bicycle basket of the bunch. It should go without saying that all the other kids put their sack lunches into this nerd's rolling baggage bin. So as Nerd Boy rides super-cautiously toward the back of the pack, his friends commit various biking rule violations and consequently get T-Boned, steam-rolled, veered into, railroaded, man-holed, creamed, and Salad-Shootered one-by-one, until Mr. Pokey is the only one left. Though Master N's mom has no doubt prepared him a lunch of cucumber sandwiches, his chunky friends were all packing Baconators and Triple Cheeseburgers slathered in Mayo. As the title proclaims, Orville-the-Nerd eats ALL the lunches in homage to his fallen friends, gets fat (think the Blueberry Girl in Willie Wonka), and--EXPLODES!!
tavm
On a recommendation from Cartoon Brew, I saw this bizarre educational short about bicycle safety, with art direction by Disney artist Ralph Hulett, on Google. Narrated by Edward Everett Horton (best known to modern day viewers for his Fractured Fairly Tales voice-over), One Got Fat has most of the kids in monkey masks and tails suffering one bike accident after another (and not being able to tell the tale) to sound and visual cartoon effects. Only one kid who followed the rules of bike safety was human and he got to eat all his buddies lunches, hence the title...Horton provides amusing commentary especially when he keeps saying, "Right?...Right." Since I'm used to SNL sketches in which characters bleed and die, this short didn't scare me much but I can sympathize with anyone who had nightmares after seeing this in elementary grade school classes for years. Of course, maybe the bland music didn't help...
