Monkey Business: What Len Powers’ Forgotten Dippy Doo Dads Tell Us about Acting

One hundred years ago you could pick up the latest issue of Moving Picture World and on one page read that the state of Pennsylvania officially adopted the term “projectionist” over the more common-at-the-time title of “moving picture operator.” On the previous page, you could see a short review of the one-reeler The Watch Dog, in which “A monkey robs a peanut stand, after distracting the watch dog’s attention, with the aid of the goat and cat.” This was the second (although earliest surviving) entry into a very odd historical artifact: The “Dippy Doo Dads,” a series featuring all-animal casts headlined by surprisingly talented monkeys, produced by silent comedy giant Hal Roach and directed by the all-but-forgotten Len Powers. 

Hot off the heels of the successful “Our Gang” two-reelers (better known to modern audiences as “The Little Rascals”), Roach commissioned Powers, then a cameraman on his payroll, to direct this series of novelty burlesques to be distributed by Pathé’s comedy arm. While the “Dippy Doo Dads” received moderate recognition, their complexity of production likely far exceeded their financial returns, especially when compared with the bigger successes Roach was turning out at the time—he was also the man who launched Harold Lloyd’s career and produced many of Laurel and Hardy’s silents. Altogether it seems that 13 “Dippy Doo Dads” were made between 1923 and 1924, with at least eight still existing today. 

The most well known of the “Dippies” is 1923’s Go West, likely for its inclusion as an extra on the Cohen Film Collection’s Blu-ray of the Buster Keaton comedy of the same name (it first came to my attention through Letterboxd). Their coincidental names and plot similarities are the beginning and end of any literal relationship between the two, but both are born out the spoofing of the genre that was so popular at the time—only at wildly different scales. 

Go West tells the story of a naïve young man getting kicked out of his home by a resentful father and heading to the wide-open spaces in search of opportunity. It sounds completely unremarkable—just another in a pile of pictures that sound exactly like it—except that almost all the principal characters are played by monkeys. And the monkeys, I must say, are quite good. They’re sharply dressed and quite well-behaved (too well-behaved?), and their big movements in their small world honestly mimic the melodramatics of silent film acting. There’s a scene where the mother monkey sits down next to her bed to pray for her boy, and through the glint in her eyes you can almost see the ingenuous expressions so embodied by Lillian Gish. 

Part of what makes the “Dippies” work so well is how seriously Powers directs them. They really are like if you shrunk down the human world (as filtered through the silent cinema) to the scale of small animals (a formula animators have always had fun with). The miniature sets are lovingly detailed, and there are even tiny little trains, planes and automobiles. One of the most thrilling sequences in any of the pictures is the climactic chase at the end of Lovey Dovey, where a scoundrel steals the hero monkey’s girl, and then tries to throw the hero off of a cliff tied to a car. The hero escapes at the last second and finds a small sheep to ride after the villain, who hopped on a hot air balloon with the helpless maiden in tow. The hero rides up just in time to grab on to the rope that tethered it to the ground, climbing to the top of the balloon where he successfully fights the villain and jumps off with his girl. They use her dress as a parachute, advantageously landing them right in front of a church for a quick marriage. The two then magically float off. It has every bit of the whimsy of the comedies Roach was so known for, just not the stars.

Every once and a while a snippet from Kelsey Grammer’s 1995 memoir So Far… makes the rounds online for his opinion on animal acting, or what he believes is the lack thereof: 

It’s widely rumored that I hate the dog, and it’s kind of fun to perpetuate the myth. The truth is, I have nothing against Moose. The only difficulty I have is when people start believing he’s an actor. Acting to me is a craft, not a reflex. It takes years to master, and though it does have its rewards, the reward I seek is not a hot dog. Moose does tricks; I memorize lines, say words, even walk around and stuff. But I don’t need a trainer standing off-camera, gesticulating wildly and waving around a piece of meat, to know where I’m supposed to look. 

He is right, albeit with a pedantry fitting of Frasier Crane. But Grammer being a classically trained actor who first came up on the stage also informs his decidedly uncinematic take on the actor’s role within the image.

One of the initially strange digressions in Sergei Eisenstein’s seminal collection of theory Film Form is how much he writes about Kabuki. Silent cinema acting is often physical and expressive—no doubt drawing on trends more in line with vaudeville than opera—and while Kabuki is known for its vibrant performances, Eisenstein is less interested in the quality of the acting than the function. Actors themselves are more vehicles for masks than they are literal people; they are archetypes that tell a story through Kabuki’s proprietary language and symbology. Eisenstein calls it “ideographic.” 

Powers’ monkeys are equally archetypical. Be they the good-hearted country boy going to the city in Handle ‘Em Rough or the no-good deadbeat scoundrel in North of 50-50, the characters in the “Dippies” are immediately apparent to anyone with a passing knowledge of American silent film tropes (I also noticed at least one instance of a monkey in blackface in Lovey Dovey). Doing as little as showing one group of people arrive by car followed by another arriving by public transit can establish a class dynamic, as Powers does with the ducks and fowls at the beginning of The Knockout (also known as The Dippy Doo Dah Club in its shorter toy film version, seen here). 

Eisenstein’s approach to filmmaking is atomistic; he believed that each image holds within it a unique quality, and that through their juxtaposition with each other new meaning could be synthesized. It’s more than just the pop-Hegelianism that was in vogue in those chaotic early days of that socialist state, it’s a genuine science that Eisenstein was trying to formalize for the most modern and, as Lenin said, “the most important of the arts.” The “Dippies” were clearly not drawing from burgeoning Soviet film theory (and I doubt Roach would’ve been interested in the works of Marxists anyways, considering he started a production company with Il Duce’s son, Vittorio Mussolini, in the late 1930s), but Eisenstein’s symbolic approach, along with Lev Kuleshov’s famous observation that an actor’s expression can be understood not just for itself, but by what the filmmaker cuts to, explains why the “acting” in the “Dippies” works—it’s a formal construction.

Debates about what constitutes acting are probably as ancient as the medium of expression itself, but what is certain is that there is something uniquely human to the way we communicate. As the “talking ape” debate seems to have decisively concluded with “they can’t,” we have started to understand that even our closest and most complex mammalia communicate fundamentally differently than we do. We can, to a certain degree, have animals convey wants and needs to us. Any pet owner can tell you that. Unfortunately, any sort of human affectation is just that. When a monkey smiles, it’s not out of pleasure but fear. 

I can’t say for certain how the monkeys and other animals were treated on the sets of the “Dippy Doo Dads.” I am not a historian and my research is limited to whatever archival material has been digitized. I imagine almost all of the people even peripherally involved with the making of these mostly forgotten novelties are all long-since dead. I don’t know how to get a monkey to put together its hands in prayer or make it look like it’s driving a car, let alone somehow choreograph the shockingly intricate mise en scène of the “Dippies.” I don’t even know how they put shoes on a monkey. 

But it would seem that even contemporary animal rights advocates found the series to be deeply concerning, with the animals clearly forced to work under duress in a way that likely led to injury. This extratextual information, like that which plagues so many other fun animal movies haunted by their productions, makes the “Dippies” hard to watch. The “performances” go from being novel for their human likeness to strange prisons—a kind of nightmare world where the expression of pain is transposed with the viewer’s idea of pleasure. The specific transfer I watched of Be Honest had the front of the reel in pretty severe condition; the images were brittle and frayed as I watched a monkey perform daring escapes from the police after stealing a hen’s egg. It felt archeological, but in an intrusive way, like I was seeing something I wasn’t supposed to, something that was buried for a reason.

Maybe most concerning for me is, even after all this research, my gut reaction to the “Dippy Doo Dads” is a kind of childlike joy. That speaks some to my habits as a viewer, but also to the effectiveness of the filmmaking on display—they are fantastically produced, directed, “acted.” It is even more fake than typical Hollywood movies, where even the “acting” is another illusion sold to us by hucksters, but I can’t deny that there is a magic to that illusion, one that can even (at times) overtake the dark reality of their productions. The oddball little spoofs of silent genre films and their form genuinely highlight the power of film editing to project meaning. The “Dippies” aren’t the kind of movies they make anymore. In fact they’re the exact kind of movies that shouldn’t be made like they used to. And maybe it takes that hundred years of distance to get past the sadness of what it took to create them. They are a strange testament to cinema’s power, films that shouldn’t be made but that shouldn’t disappear.

Alex Lei is writer and filmmaker currently based in Baltimore. He can usually be found on Twitter.