Mr. B Natural (1956)

This is How Movies Should Be Made

Admirable film.

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

You know, I can sort of see where Betty Luster and the director were going with this short, but I really think that this thing just sort of got away from them and the film makers weren't able to salvage it in post production. So they just tossed it out there and hoped for the best. B-I-G M-I-S-T-A-K-E !! A description of the plot makes it sound appealing enough: a boy in middle school needs something to help him come out of his shell.The spirit of music appears to him and inspires him to take up an instrument (the trumpet). Success, popularity and hot jazz licks follow in short order. That sounds pretty good, even to me (although I played double reeds in middle school, which scarred me emotionally for life). However, the execution of this simple premise, as played out by Betty Luster as the leotarded, androgynous Girl-Man, will cause you to doubt your senses. The kindest descriptive term I can come up with for her performance is: "over-caffeinated". Or maybe: "Mary Martin as Peter Pan does methamphetamine". Someone needed to educate her (and the director) about the dramatic differences between portraying "joy and enthusiasm" as opposed to "manic part of her mood swing". Still, even though it's awful, it's so mind boggling that any fan or collector of B&W educational shorts ought to see it. Once. However, the only place I can imagine you finding it these days would be as the introductory short feature to "War Of The Colossal Beast" on one of the Mystery Science Theatre collections by Rhino. If you don't enjoy or approve of MST3K's antics, you'll have to give this one a pass.

In one of the many so-called educational films from the '50s, a jolly, spandex-clad woman calling herself Mr. B ("Mr. B"...hmmm, is she a lesbian?) shows a tensed-up schoolboy the wonders of musical instruments and reminds him to BE NATURAL (har har). "Mr. B Natural" is exactly the sort of movie that would make anyone hate music. Maybe that's why people seem to have been getting stupider for years: this sort of junk was used as education! If that sort of woman popped up in my room, I'd ask her whether she's on speed.Fortunately, all is not lost: "MST3K" showed this movie. As Crow put it: "Oscar Wilde wished he was this gay." Too bad that they didn't make any "I Dream of Jeannie" jokes; not only is there a character named Jeannie, but Mr. B appears and disappears (and makes things appear and disappear) like Barbara Eden's famous character.So, the movie itself is 0/10, but the "MST3K" version is 9/10 (a Jeannie joke would have pushed it into 10/10).

Pity the Conn instrument manufacturers -- which are still, possibly alarmingly, in business today -- aren't still doing media advertisements, because I might run into one of their infomercials on late night cable.Late night cable not existing yet in the 1950s, this ghastly short made its way into the classrooms of the day ... perhaps as a result of sweetheart deals and kickbacks to local high school music departments. Sporting a Grade C Mary Martin-clone speaking in a helium-driven voice, the audience is shown the dubious message that the route to high school popularity is to join the band, and of course to buy only the most expensive possible instruments.While this was seemingly the last thing (and one of the only, as to that) Ms. Luster did in show business, one can't help but think that the director, costumer and set designer had good times ahead working for the 1960s' Batman show.3/10.

This 20 minute short tries to show you the beauty of music and how you can express feelings with various instruments. That sounds like a nice premise, but the direction and characters disfigured the plot to the point of being unrecognizable. Mr. B Natural is as inane of a name as the character is. This person is a woman, but she's called a 'mister'. Is she a transvette then? Nobody will know what influenced the creation of this name. The story is about a nerdy college boy who wants to be accepted by his friends, and apparently takes a lot of drugs because when at home one day he hallucinates that he is talking to a woman dressed in a peter-pan esque outfit who is obsessed with all kinds of music. She/he is the most mentally disfunctional freak I've ever seen, prancing around like a moron in the most randomly generated dance routines. Her/his voice is also high pitched, to the point where Joel and the bots cringe when they see her in the screen. I think the director tried to make her seem like a perky, happy person who motivates the kid, but it is horribly overdone and turns her/him into a nightmare which can only exist as a bad hallucination. Imagine a woman whose eyes are wide open all the time, who always has a grin that stretches across her face and talks in a screechy voice about happy things, while dancing around maniacally. There you go.SPOILERS up ahead, tho you can predict the whole movie by just reading the summaryB natural 'motivates' Buzz, the kid, to take up a musical hobby and after a few days of mistake-free practice, he turns into an expert in the trumpet but the tunes he plays sound stupid anyway (as joel and the bots would agree). As you would expect there is terrible acting and so on. Mr. B Natural is very painful to watch and would be more effective as a device to use in threats and torture. However, watch this with MST3K and I guarantee it will turn this short from musical-gone-wrong into excellent comedy. To quote tom servo during one of the dancing scenes, "See Buzz? its really fun to be psychotic!"