Believe It or Not #4 (1930) User Reviews

A Fish Story

[boblipton · 6/10 · 27 January 2024]

Little Billy has finished his lessons, so he goes to visit Robert L. Ripley in Believe It Or Not Land. After some minor stuff, Ripley shows him some odd fish, giant trees, and dancing mice.

There are more oddities than unbelievable facts here, mostly the result of human cussedness, like a suit made of Confederate money, or a rocking chair built from empty cans. This mixture of silliness and astonishment was a regular part of the newspaper feature, and presumably was planned thuswise on a "if you can believe this, you'll believe the next" basis. It's a good technique for slipping a whopper past an audience.

Don't Believe It

[Calaboss · 5/10 · 31 October 2008]

Chinless wonder, Robert Ripley, brings us a man that stacks 12 billiard balls on one hand, a blind man that says he built a house, and a toothless man pronouncing a 124 letter word. Beyond that, this short has nothing more than Ripley pretending to draw pictures of people he says exist. Like a woman with a tattoo of her husband on her tongue and a Chinese man with fingernails two feet long. Unfortunately for the Ripster, drawn pictures do not do anything to prove that something exists.

This is another in a series of Ripley shorts that are long on story and short on facts. I could draw a picture of a puppy with wings flying over Baltimore, but would you believe it? I wouldn't.

About average for a Ripley short.

Fair

[Michael_Elliott · 4 November 2008]

Believe It or Not #4 (1930)

** (out of 4)

Robert L. Ripley is back with more stories of the strange, weird and unbelievable. Stories in this fourth edition include a blind man who built a two-story house, a toothless man saying the biggest word in the vocabulary (184 letters) and a woman who tattooed her husband's picture on her tongue. This is the weakest of the first four shorts in the series because a lot of the stories are either animation or drawn on a board. The longest word is done live but it's hard to understand what the word is or its meaning. Another story includes a 1890 baseball play where a batter hit the ball, which wasn't a home run until it hit the outfielders head and bounced over the wall. Jose Canseco would do this nearly one-hundred years later of course. The best thing we get to see is a man who has such large hands that he can pick up 12-pool balls with one hand.