Comedy Spotlight: The Lost Bass Drum; or, Where Is That Looie? (1907)

 

The award-winning film Whiplash was not the first narrative piece to detail the trials and tribulations of the drummer.  Gaumont introduced a myriad of whiplash cases in a violent and hair-raising story about a drummer called The Lost Bass Drum.

 
A drummer of a regimental band is on his way to an engagement when he gets into an altercation and loses control of his drum, which goes rolling down an incline in the street.  The drum creates a great deal of havoc, knocking down the various people that get in its way.  The rolling drum is similar to the rolling pumpkins that wreaked havoc earlier in the year in Gaumont’s The Pumpkin Race.  As it turned out, the rolling drum and the rolling pumpkins were forerunners to the rolling boulders that menaced Buster Keaton in Seven Chances (1926).

And what about the rolling canned goods in Jerry Lewis’ The Disorderly Orderly (1964)?