The Boxing Kangaroo
The Boxing Kangaroo is an 1896 British short black-and-white silent documentary film, produced and directed by Birt Acres for exhibition on Robert W. Paul’s peep show Kinetoscopes, featuring a young boy boxing with a kangaroo. The film was considered lost until footage from an 1896 Fairground Programme, originally shown in a portable booth at Hull Fair by Midlands photographer George Williams, donated to the National Fairground Archive was identified as being from this film.
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Overrated
A brilliant film that helped define a genre
It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.
In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.
The idea of a boxing kangaroo is a staple in movie comedy. There was at least one live-action comedy short in the 1920s on the theme, starring the poorly-remembered Lige Conley and, of course, Bob McKimson had a small series of cartoons in the 1950s in which Sylvester the Cat would continually battle with Hippety Hopper, under the mistaken impression that he was actually a very large mouse. Frankly, neither the Conley movie nor the McKimsons were much of anything. Apparently once you get past the initial gag, no one was able to think of much in the way of variation.So this 1896 actuality by Birt Acres, today best remembered as a collaborator of Robert Paul, is just about right: ten or fifteen seconds of a real stage act in which a kangaroo boxes with a human opponent.