Tommy Tricker is a children’s film about a society ordered on the basis of stamp collecting. This is a world where all ages can identify a rare stamp on sight, and where everyone is constantly grifting and wheedling to get ahead to improve their collection. Tommy Tricker is a young scam artist who excels in ripping people off by using stamps. The movie spends a lot of time building up Tommy Tricker’s character, only to pull a real switcheroo and have the actual lead character be some kid named Ralph who gets into black stamp magic and is granted the power to get animated, shrink down, and travel on a stamp. This takes him to both China, and more notably Australia, which has funnier stereotypes.
Though there are plenty of wild, inexplicable moments, these are pretty well-balanced with a lot of grind, where you’re watching the movie manage its pieces in a fairly normal way while you’re waiting for the good stuff. While there is a specific type of thrill when you realize for instance that Ralph’s parents don’t seem to know or care that he has been missing for weeks, followed by Ralph’s father’s blood-curdling scream when he suddenly appears in front of them, I found sadly that these moments were eclipsed by the grind getting to them.
I definitely don’t believe that good art necessarily has be connected to how well it achieves its intentions. We have plenty of master classes in greatness achieved by creating a desired effect, but the rarer and potentially more powerful finds are the movies where you’re called on to create a “house effect” of your own, transforming a bunch of ill-considered choices into a meaningful and enjoyable experience. Tommy Tricker toes the line into this kind of experience, but unfortunately the movie’s ability to coast by as a just-good-enough children’s film handicaps it. This innate understanding of a simple form keeps it from getting to the heights of a Roar, or The Room, or one of Neil Breen’s films, etc., movies where the allegiance of their intentions can have more in common with a reflex test at the doctor’s than a carefully-made plan.
There are some very inspired moments. The depth of attention Tommy Tricker pays to stamp collecting is bonkers, and everything in Australia is great, and the film operates on a different level – a highlight here is when a character “driven mad by having all of his zoo animals poisoned” chains Tommy Tricker to a didgeridoo in a pen with a bunch of “lying kangaroos.” On the whole though, I feel like this one is strictly for the curiosity heads. The movie’s director made another film called The Peanut Butter Solution, which while i think has some of the same problems as this one, I’d recommend more as it has a deeper, wilder undercurrent that comes from subbing out stamp collecting for prepubescent body horror. While there can be transcendence in ignorance of form and quality, this film as a whole reminded me of watching a meandering improv set, one that has moments of brilliance and a strangely singular tone, but is ultimately buried under a cloud of directionless noodling.
Rock Demers produced 22 movies in the “Tales for All” series between 1984 and 2004. I’ve seen “Tales for All” #2, Michael Rubbo’s The Peanut Butter Solution (1985), maybe ten times and I absolutely recommend it. It’s a character caper with seriously convoluted plotting, endless, strange non-sequiturs, and a visual humor that casually edges as readily into the slapstick as the nightmarish; its “fully-realized but completely mysterious world”-mode connects it to everything from The Room (2003), to Nightbreed (1990), to Peewee Herman, to Paper Rad. The most accurate description of the movie I have is: It’s fun to ask people to watch it, and then ask them to describe it to you. “Tales for All” #7, Tommy Tricker & the Stamp Traveller, is Michael Rubbo’s second contribution to the series (of four total), and I loved this one too.
Tommy Tricker takes place on a planet Earth similar to this one, except that all people are inordinately interested, each for their own reasons, in stamps or the mail. Many people collect stamps for their beauty, or to take pride in their rarity; others deal stamps as a speculative commodity; some have pen pals; one guy tries to commit mail fraud. There’s also a small hobo subculture of people who travel the earth by casting a spell that embeds them on a stamp for the duration of its mail-time, to be transformed back into a person on arrival.
The basic plot, unifying an episodic collection of on-location hijinks shot throughout suburban Canada, Australia, and China, is that a kid trades his hothead Dad’s coolest stamp to Tommy Tricker, and eventually figures out that he can use stamp travel to get to Australia, where he suspects he’ll be able to recover a book of extremely rare stamps, which he hopes to bring home to mollify Dad… got that? As in The Peanut Butter Solution, there’re so many unnecessary details, quirks, asides, and unanswered questions that I’m tempted to go ham and add a second post listing my favorite fifty, and possibly a third with a deep dive on the rules, physics, and various implications of stamp travel. (Me, on stage in a dark and silent auditorium, addressing no one: “And I will, if anyone is actually interested.”)
I found the movie notably more coherent on rewatch. I’m reminded that as a kid I’d view movies by “having them on,” and familiarity with the characters and “what happens” would become both assumed and total throughout all parts of a viewing, such that any given movie’s scenes could be watched in any order, partially, and so on. I appreciate that Tommy Tricker feels structured to anticipate this immersed, kid-style repetitive viewing mode, and I enjoy the particular kind of confusion it creates for me, as an adult viewer, who now sits down and watches things straight through, and usually just once.