"Hop to It!" is one of the brief series of films that paired Bobby Ray with Oliver 'Babe' Hardy before Hardy's immortal teaming with Stan Laurel. Several critics have suggested that Ray and Hardy -- the gormless little man and the overbearing big man -- were a prototype for Laurel and Hardy, but that simply isn't true. Ray and Hardy play off each other well, but really aren't a team; in each of these films, Ray has more footage and is clearly meant to be the hero, while Hardy bullies him in a manner very much unlike his later "Ollie" character's treatment of "Stanley". In "Hop to It!", Hardy plays an outright thief and arsonist, quite different from his later tie-twiddling "Ollie" persona. It's very clear that the relationship between little Bobby and big Babe was inspired by earlier Chaplin films, in which the Little Tramp was bullied by huge Mack Swain or burly Eric Campbell. One shot in "Hop to It!", with little Ray burdened by four steamer trunks while huge Hardy carries two dainty valises, is clearly inspired by similar gags in Chaplin's 'His Musical Career' and 'A Film Johnny'.
The moustache which Hardy sports in "Hop to It!" is remarkably similar to the one that W.C. Fields wore in a couple of his silent films. There's a gag here involving Oliver Hardy and a fire axe which (probably by coincidence) is astonishingly similar to a gag which Stan Laurel had previously performed onstage in England, in his music-hall routine "The Rum 'Uns from Rome".
Bobby and Babe are bellhops at the Hotel Bilkmore. Frank Alexander, even larger than Hardy, signs in as a guest. When Bobby spills ink that blackens Alexander's face, I cringed -- expecting a racial gag -- then relaxed when it didn't arrive. A few minutes later in the same reel, though, we get a racist sequence involving the hotel's black porter and maid and a black version of Cupid.
There's a clever and technically impressive gag when water is spilt on Alexander while he sleeps: overhead, we see a superimposed double exposure that depicts Alexander dreaming he's at the seaside. Much more contrived is a routine in which the hotel clerk keeps telling Bobby to "give ... a bath" to a guest who merely wants a towel. And I've seen quite a few comedies that depicted the confusions after a numeral 6 is inverted into a 9, or vice versa, but "Hop to It!" is shameless enough to feature TWO such inversions, both accidental.
I agree with an earlier IMDb reviewer: there are some technically impressive match cuts in this film each time a character falls off the roof onto the pavement: the transition from a plummeting dummy to a live actor is flawless ... a feat made even more impressive because each of the match cuts is an exterior long shot, with no movement in the background to reveal the transition. Much less impressive is a shot (from behind) of Janet Dawn's character on the rooftop edge, clearly doubled by a male in her clothes.
Throughout this film, Hardy's gestures and facial expressions are superb: he really was an actor of great subtlety. SLIGHT SPOILER: The fade-out gag in this 1925 film might confuse modern audiences; it involves booze, in a movie which doesn't otherwise mention Prohibition. "Hop to It!" is very funny and well-made, despite that unnecessary and unfunny racist sequence, and I'll rate this movie 8 out of 10.
