a5c7b9f00b In this parody of 1903&#39;s _Great Train Robbery, The (1903)_, also made by <a href=">Edwin S. Porter, young bandits rob the passengers of a kiddie train and are chased by police officers. Seven or eight fellows are sitting around when their boss, a gal, tells them to put on their masks; she brings in a blindfolded man and sends the boys out to do a job. They borrow horses, block a train track, and set up an ambush. They knock out the engineer and rob each passenger, all of whom are dressed in white. The gang escapes in the first car of the train, then they remount their horses and scramble through forest and across a creek. Police pursue on foot. Back at the hideout, the gang split the swag and run from the cops. The gang tries swimming to safety, but the cops have a rowboat. Will any escape? In spoofing his own hit movie, Edwin S. Porter produces a fairly creative parody that is worth seeing in itself, and that is perhaps even more interesting in historical terms. &quot;The Little Train Robbery&quot; is a re-working of the classic &quot;The Great Train Robbery&quot;, with all the characters changed to children, and most of the settings miniaturized accordingly.<br/><br/>The story often parallels the original quite closely, and the more familiar you are with the original, the more similarities you can spot. So this is more than just one of the era&#39;s common remakes of the one-shot films that had become popular - it involved a detailed look at the original movie, with many choicesto how closely to follow it. It is certainly one of the most detailed examples of this kind to be found in the first decade or so of cinema history.<br/><br/>There are also times when, in contrast to the original, details are changed to play up the fact that the characters here are all children. As such, it is interesting in terms of the age-old debateto how far behavior, especially of the young, might be influenced by the movies. Attitudes always change from one era to the next, and not always in the same direction. Attitudes in past eras were not alwayssimplewe may assume them to have been, and this is the kind of example that provides an interesting perspective on the issue.<br/><br/>Seen simplya movie, this is not one of the best of its era, but it has some clever features, and it still works well enough. To the audiences of the time, to whom &quot;The Great Train Robbery&quot; would have been one of the very best movies they had ever seen, there would probably have been noticeable interest in this parody version. Thomas Edison&#39;s Motion Picture Company is remembered primarily for two things: 1) ripping off the competition whenever possible (done best today by TV&#39;s SciFi Channel, but pioneereda profit-maximizing technique by light bulb inventor Edison), and 2) suing the competition for ripping YOU off (for which Edison&#39;s film company was particularly notorious; while point #2 seems on the face of it to be in conflict with point #1, Edison hired the finest legal minds of his day, and they knew that under the American legal system, the litigant with the most money wins 99 percent of the time; if that party also is the most ballyhooed, the victory rate is upped about another percentile). However, occasionally Edison&#39;s henchmen contributed other innovations to the film industry,is the case with THE LITTLE TRAIN ROBBERY (1905). Herein, the Edison crew pioneers the idea that if sex and violence is the top seller for the grown-ups, why not hook the young &#39;uns on the same while their tender brains are being formed and wired? This worked, of course, which is why modern cinema isit appears today.
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