The Kid Stakes
Fatty Finn enters his pet goat in a billycart race, but Fatty’s rival lets the goat loose, right before the contest.
In this silent film based on the popular Fatty Finn comic strips, Fatty Finn is the scruffy leader of a gang of kids in the dockside suburb of Woolloomooloo in Sydney. He enters his pet goat Hector in the Kid Stakes, the annual goat races, but his rival Bruiser Murphy tries to stop him from winning by getting Hector locked up. Finn and his gang must find a way to free Hector and get to the track in time for the races. Beautifully shot on the inner-city streets of Sydney in the 1920s, the goat race was filmed in Rockhampton, Queensland because goat racing was illegal in New South Wales. THE KID STAKES is an entertaining children’s film and one of the great Australian comedies of the silent era.
Distributed by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.