One of the best Laurel and Hardy shorts from 1929, this is one our Blackhawk 400fts which is full length at just a few seconds shy of 20 minutes.
The storyline with the help of wiki,
Two families embark on a picnic in their Ford Model T, but manage to run into a variety of issues with the temperamental automobile. Each incident requires repeated exits and recordings by Laurel, Hardy, their wives and grouchy, gout-ridden Uncle Edgar, and repetitions of the word ‘goodbye’. This segment may have been inspired by UK comedian Harry Tate and his famous 1907 ‘Motoring’ sketch, a vaudeville staple well-known on both sides of the Atlantic. A brick-throwing argument with a neighbour threatens to escalate into an all-out turf war until the local parson Walks by. The families manage to finally get their day underway, only to plunge neck-deep into a seemingly shallow, water-filled pothole.
One of the funniest parts that never fails to make me laugh is when Olli tells Stand to do something useful like throw out the clutch. He rips it out of the floor and throws it out the car onto the road. Ollie picks it up, takes off Stan’s hat and throws it onto his head with a loud metallic spring “boing” effect and bounces off his head and out of the screen, it is very funny.
The original 1929 release of this short contained no music other than that used over the opening credits. The Roach Studios would reissue the film in 1937 with an added music score being utilized at the time in other Roach comedies. The 1929 version was considered lost until the 2011 DVD release Laurel and Hardy: The Essential Collection, when the original Vitaphone disc track sans the incidental music became available.

This Blackhawk super 8 print is very good, a good sharp image and very good sound with a good contrast so no overly white blobs for faces like a few I have seen which I can only assume were from poor dupe copies. This is one of their better ones. As you see from the screenshot it has the Blackhawk replacement main title.

Quote: Tom Photiou wrote in post #1

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This Blackhawk super 8 print is very good, a good sharp image and very good sound with a good contrast so no overly white blobs for faces like a few I have seen which I can only assume were from poor dupe copies. This is one of their better ones. As you see from the screenshot it has the Blackhawk replacement main title.

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We do have a couple of Standard 8 L&H films, County Hospital, Thicker than water which was the last two-reel comedy from L&H as Hal Roach decided to end the short films and move them solely into feature films. And we also have a STD 8 400ft version of Midnight patrol.

I do agree that standard 8 films generally had a very good image on the b/w films, one of our first films was a Walton STD 8 edition of the Music box which was abridged to 400ft. It was years later before we got hold of a full length 600ft print on super 8.

Quote: Tom Photiou wrote in post #3

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We do have a couple of Standard 8 L&H films, County Hospital, Thicker than water which was the last two-reel comedy from L&H as Hal Roach decided to end the short films and move them solely into feature films. And we also have a STD 8 400ft version of Midnight patrol.

I do agree that standard 8 films generally had a very good image on the b/w films, one of our first films was a Walton STD 8 edition of the Music box which was abridged to 400ft. It was years later before we got hold of a full length 600ft print on super 8.

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I'd be remiss if I didn't comment on the actual content of the films mentioned, regardless of the image quality.

PERFECT DAY is one of their better talkie shorts from the first season of making them (mid 1929 - mid-1930). I think it is helped immeasurably by the background music that was added in 1936, though I have never seen (or actually heard) the version without the music. There are many L&H talkie shorts (out of a total of 40) that I like better; this was never one of my favorites. It is not one of their talkie shorts that warrants many repeated viewings within a short time-span. My opinion, of course.

COUNTY HOSPITAL is much better, IMO. I do not believe a version of this short exists without the re-issue background music that was added for the late 30s re-release. I think this short would suffer somewhat without the background music. What stops this short from being a stone-cold classic is the extremely disappointing ending sequence in the car. The less said about that, the better. What precedes it, however, is top-tier L&H. This has long been one of my favorites among their talkie shorts, though at the lower end of "top-tier", for me.

THICKER THAN WATER is a very average short for a L&H talkie -- I actually might consider it to be below-average, depending upon my mood. You need to realize that out of the 40 talkie shorts that they made, there are many, many ones that are much better than this one. "Below average" is relative to the 40 shorts as a whole. You need to think of it as a Bell curve. What does make this one a bit distinctive is the sophisticated (for 1935) optical wipes that aid in transitioning from scene to scene. The ending is one of their most original "freak" endings that they were famous for. Some have called the ending "complex", but I had never thought of it as such until I read the reason why it is considered complex. I won't go into the details here, for risk of spoiling it for those who have not seen it.

MIDNIGHT PATROL is an average L&H talkie short that could have been much better. There really isn't much wrong with it other than you get the "been there, done that" feeling when watching it, assuming you have seen most of their work up until this point, and that you have watched the shorts chronologically. That being said, there is not much here that they didn't do better elsewhere in their film career. A very surprising ending that I won't give away.

THE MUSIC BOX is a stone-cold classic, and one of my favorite films of theirs overall, including their silents and features. In my top 3 overall of their films. (I've never really decided among the top 3 which is the best -- so let's consider it a tie.) I've never seen the edited version -- I would recommend seeing the complete version. Some 10-15 years ago I ran into some people who considered it over-rated. I've never heard that before or since. To each his own.