A MODEL COMMUNITY.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 19057, 9 July 1924, Page 8

A MODEL COMMUNITY.

There is one city in Southern California without a Chamber of Commerce. No Booster’s Club holds weekly luncheons. No “blile law” campaign disrupts the body politic. Inhabitants may dance the clock around with impunity, or tear up the landscape in abandoned enjoyment life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, secure from official interruption of their monkeyshines. The Utopian community is the Dippy Doo Dad village Hal Roach, the movie producer, has built for his performing animals. Many have seen it on the screen and laughed at the droll antics of its residents, but few realis’s such a community actually exists. Len Pow’ers, the director, has seen to is that there are modern conveniences in Dippy-Doo-Dadville, including telephones, electric lights and street car service. There is even the D. D. D. railway, with specially built locomotives, freight cars and passenger coaches. Taxi-cabs roll about the streets of this miniature city. There's a modern hotel with practically elevators; there’s a church with its pipe organ, a courtroom and a school. The Dippy-Doo-Dads even have their own billiard tables. Everything is built onefourth its natural size for the diminutive stature of the members of this company. The Dippy-Doo Dads have their own branch of the studio wardrobe department. All their clothes arc made to order, including a wide assortment of shoes. Of course, there is little humour intrinsically in the actions of these animals. The laughs come when they en act with all seriousness the hackneyed, tried-and-true plots that have bored motion-picture audiences for yean. Powers recently furnished a wild society melodrama in which the jewels are stolen, the heroine is kidnapped nod the papers disappear. The story is “kidded” in the titles, but not in the action. The incongurity of all this makes its ludicrously funny.