Usually these shorts from the 40's and 50's do one of two things. They tell the audience about problems and how to solve them or they advertise some sort of great product. Still others are cartoons and things like that which had to be the best of the stuff that proceeded a film. This one seems to be none of the above as old timer Billy Slater quickly reels in the children of his town and has a junior rodeo where a child could be horribly crippled or maimed. I laugh at the thought of something like this in the city where people sue when their child falls off a playground slide or something and breaks their arm. Here they could be paralyzed, I am quite sure the one girl who flew off the one animal and was walking very gingerly back to the sides was very hurt. So from what I saw this short was showing the great fun a town can have at a junior rodeo, well to each his own, but this did not look fun at all. Probably over 90 degrees outside and the smell of animals and their waste in the air, getting thrown violently to the ground if participating. Just nothing I see as a fun event and this short did not help the cause.

Man, how times have changed! If you believe what you see in Junior Rodeo Daredevils, it seems that in the 1940s, any crazy stranger could take your kid, strap him/her to some sort of livestock, and watch them get thrown to the hard ground. Oh what fun - child abuse as entertainment! What parent wouldn't want a broken neck or a ruptured spleen for their child? Instead of being brought up on charges, Old-Timer Billy Slater gets to sit back and enjoy the sight of children having their necks snapped. It did my heart good to see this crazy old coot laugh like a hyena as one child after the next received severe head trauma. Yes, Junior Rodeo Daredevils is certainly one of the most demented sights I've ever seen.Mystery Science Theater 3000 did a wonderful job with this short. The riffing possibilities were abundant and the guys took full advantage. Much of it is laugh-out-loud funny. On my MST3K rating scale, Junior Rodeo Daredevils gets a 4/5.

I have the feeling that "Junior Rodeo Daredevils" was a freebie when grade school districts purchased Encyclopedia Britannica sets, which meant it went into the A-V closet and was never heard from again, or maybe only shown when an educational film was too short. In any case, this half-reeler revolves around some ranch town in the southwest where geezer Billy Slater finds two small boys tying a can on his horses' tail. Instead of beating them with a strap, he decides to run a junior rodeo on his flyspeck ranch and give out prizes that look like they were fished out of the town dump. The boys make cheapo posters and tack them up all over town, attracting every "child" from 5 to 15, though I suspect some of the contestants were midgets. Soon the all-white rodeo begins, with stumpy toddlers being thrown from greased pigs, skinny girls flying off ponies, and this lanky 7th grader riding a bucking mule for at least 10 seconds. The "prizes" are handed out, all while the old coot smiles and displays his perfect set of teeth, as true a sign as any that he was a Hollywood cowboy. We may cry child endangerment now, but it is obvious that semiprofessionals were featured. In any case, the MST3K version was a laugh riot, and this short is as funny or funnier than "The Days of Our Years" or that Ma Bell promotional where the woman sings about telephones while her musician husband plays "Kung Fu Fighting" on the piano.

This short film is based on a junior rodeo that two kids and an old man organize. They show scenes of several young people doing rodeo activities, like calf riding, calf roping, bull riding, and the like. These days, it would be called child endangerment.Avoid this unless you're watching the MST3K version. Joel and the bots make this turkey watchable.