Hop to It!

Two years before Laurel, Oliver Hardy (still Babe) is already the heavy who thinks he is the brains. Ted Burnsten wrote and directed this two-reel Mirthquake comedy for producer Billy West; Arrow released it on 1 July 1925. Hardy and the slight, bewildered Bobby Ray play bellhops in a hotel that exists only to punish them. A door numbered so that 6 and 9 keep swapping rooms becomes a running gag; Frank Alexander, of the Ton of Fun trio, is the guest who only wants to sleep. It is valuable less as a lost Laurel and Hardy (Laurel is not in it) than as evidence of the persona Hardy had already built: the self-sure Southern bulk, forever one mistake ahead of the disaster.