Tommy Tricker and the
Stamp Traveller
Canada is America’s neighbour, and when it comes to films, a quiet
achiever of the entertainment industry. Much smaller in size and scale compared
to the amount and scope of films that come out of the USA. So how I came to know about a film from there
called "Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveller", is still a mystery to
this day. But I loved the film and its whole idea of a boy who travels the
world inside a stamp.
I never collected stamps
as a kid myself, but I came from a time where kids my age did collect stamps.
It was a smart investment to make when you were young, as later in life, a vast
collection of stamps of varied amounts and designs would be worth a lot one
day. Apparently, if a stamp has a mistake in its design, it’s worth even more.
Tommy Tricker, our films main character, knows this and he knows stamps. He’s
an avid collector, with the plan of selling them to kids in the schoolyard. Tommy’s
school mate Albert, is the President of the Stamp Collecting Society, who
accuses Tommy of being a con man, selling his co-students stamps that are
nowhere near the amount he’s claiming. And Albert isn’t far wrong, as Tommy
uses his cool street smarts and juvenile punk attitude to trick other kids into
trading stamps. Kind of a contrast that a kid that’s sort of a badass should
collect and know so much about stamps, but Hey!
Going around to his mate
Ralph’s house after school one day, Tommy manages to nab a rare stamp that
belongs to Ralph’s dad. Ralph is a nervous kind of kid, who struggles to speak
with his stutter, and doesn’t catch on to Tommy’s sneaky stories. Running off
with it, Tommy has no idea how special this stamp is. Taking it to a local stamp
collecting store, Tommy sells it for $300. Tricking’s his name, and stamps are
his game. Although it’s a good business for him, it will also be the game that
gets him into a crazy situation.
Ralph and his sister Nancy
try to get the stamp back before their dad finds out its gone. They can’t
afford to buy it back, so the store owner gives them an album of stamps as
consolation. Hidden inside it is an old letter, written a long time ago by an
eleven year old boy called Charles who invites whoever finds his letter to go
searching for his treasure. The siblings go to Albert to figure out what the
letter and unusual stamp collection mean. Through further exploration, the kids
discover there is a spell they can say which will shrink them to size smaller
than an ant, and ride a stamp to anywhere in the world. Their destination – Sydney, Australia where Charles claims his treasure lies in wait to
be discovered.
Ralph is the first to
volunteer, speaking the spell and being zapped into a stamp on a letter. Unable
to put it in the mailbox themselves, some random man picks the letter up off
the ground and takes off with it. And so the adventure begins!
The letter with the stamp
on it gets thrown out of a window, kicked along the street, and thrown into a
bin, while Ralph tries to call out with his tiny voice for help. Through a
series
of random events, Tommy
ends up with the letter and stamp that’s holding Ralph trapped inside it. Tommy
then offers to help and mails the letter for Nancy and Albert, sending poor little
Ralph on his way to the Land Down Under. Glad to be on his way, Ralph is
surprised when he makes a stop in China. Luckily he gets some help from a Chinese boy who
knew about the letter coming to him. He will help Ralph continue on his journey
to Australia.
The pit stop in China is an unusual one, and watching this film again
recently made me think the producers did some deal with the Chinese film
industry to show it’s true colours, and promote it as something of a tourist
destination to the Canadians. None the less, Ralph learns a thing or two about
courage so he can find the guts to be zapped into a stamp again, and be on his
way.
Arriving at his final
destination, Ralph meets a young Aussie girl called Cheryl, who is the
granddaughter of the man who wrote the magic letters all those years ago. She
helps him to track down the treasure, which takes them to a remote house in the
bush. They then run into the last person Ralph would expect to see on the other
side of the world – Tommy! He’s discovered the secret of stamp travelling and
is on a mission to steal more stamps that he shouldn’t. The kids run into a
spot of bother as they get chased around by an Aboriginal man, played by Ernie
Dingo!
Tommy Tricker and the
Stamp Traveller is an odd little film but has its own charming appeal. It’s
imaginative and original, if not exactly coherent and the acting from the kids
is shoddy at best. But it is a kid’s film after all, and I remember enjoying
this a lot when I was younger. Probably because it was different and it
featured Australia for a good portion of it’s running time. It’s not
like the kids films of America, so maybe in my younger years I was just starting
to explore all kids of different films – Canada certainly made it’s impression on me with this funny
flick as well as The Peanut Butter Solution. They could be the reason why I
became a fan of Degrassi Junior High in the early nineties ;-)
This is a rare film, and I
couldn’t find it DVD or get it downloaded. Thank God for YouTube as just days
before I wanted to watch it, some good sport uploaded the whole film. If you’d
like to check it out for yourself, you can watch it here. Hurry before it gets taken down.
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