The seesaw and the shoe

I've mentioned John Nesbitt's Passing Parade shorts, made at MGM in the 1940s, a couple of times before, although I've tended not to do reviews on them so much largely because, to me, the shorts aren't quite as interesting as some of the other series, or standalone two reelers. A good example of this is The Seesaw and the Shoe, which showed up recently to fill out the time slot of a movie I watched off my DVR.

We this time take the true stories of two small, unimportant things, as Nesbitt tells us in his opening narration, that changed our lives for all time. Those things are the titular seesaw and the pair of shoes, but the short tells us how two men were able to use these things to come up with substantial inventions.

For the seesaw, that man was René Laennec, a French doctor circa 1820. He was trying in vain to hear a man's heartbeat well; as you can guess, this is going to lead to the invention of the stethoscope. Laennec purportedly saw two kids using a seesaw to vibrate sound through it, with one tapping at one end and the other with his ear to the seesaw listening to the vibrations. This gave Laennec the idea for a listening tube that ultimately became the stethoscope, at least if you believe Nesbitt's story.

The shoes were a pair of shoes that Charles Goodyear showed off to his friends in the early 1830s. They were made of latex, and as such were waterproof, but subject to melting due to high heat, such as being placed by a fire to dry off. It was going to take vulcanization to produce rubber that remained stable, and according to the short, that process was discovered accidentally after many years of trial and error, as well as supposedly a stint in debtors' prison. Of course, we know Goodyear was eventually successful.

I think the problem with the Passing Parade shorts is how there's no real plot as opposed to the Crime Does Not Pay shorts; no humor compared to Pete Smith or Joe McDoakes; and no time capsule value like the Traveltalks shorts. I can see why they might have been interesting to audiences back in the day, but they just don't hold up as well as some of the other series.