My least favorite Educational so far, and I've thought that in general they've been O K. This one's pretty dumb. He's a scout? That's a pastime, not a job ( and BTW, ninety years later, a very questionable pastime ). And Daddy's right, you can't light a fire by rubbing two sticks together. There's a video on YouTube that shows you how to do it, but it takes a special kind if wood and some kind of cactus which, as I remember, are only available in a remote part of New Mexico, and any old ( and I do mean old, like me ) cub scout can tell you that you'll die of old age before you'll light a fire by rubbing two of Elmer's hefty pieces of kindling together. Except then it ignites, and lights the joint on fire. No. No. Just no. It also seems apparent that by any standards Elmer is the least of the three suitors - the girl might not like the other two, but why in the world would she like Elmer? She marries him on the strength of a lift home? In the previous ones, you feel nice for Elmer when he ends up hitched, since he has in his own modest, pathetic way proven his mettle, but in this one you can only feel bad for the girl and her rash life choices. Elmer's truly on the spectrum in this one. He rode to school on the short bus. And BTW, in the early going of these reviews I didn't realize that once Buster was named Elmer he was going to be Elmer forever. Not having seen all of these flicks, I had gathered that Elmer was a generic name, like Homer or Doofus. No such luck, I see now. He's always Elmer. Dirty damn shame that such an imaginative character as he was 1917-1928 should be degraded into a dumb bohunk. He was much better as spoiled rich kid Rollo, or Johnny Gray, but I guess it would have been too expensive to keep those upper or middle class ( or in Johnny Gray's case, of humble means but massively heroic ) characters going in the Poverty Row environs of Educational. I only now realize what a rotten trick was played on Buster's career in the talkies, and sadly, Buster was partially at fault when he insisted that his talking be kept to a minimum, which stipulation seems to have been honored, in all of the Educationals anyway. The result of this, which might have been pulled off with excellent script writing, was, with Educational's extremely mediocre script writing, to make the Buster/Elmer character a monosyllabic dunce.
