Intrepid Traveller and His Merry Band of Pranksters Look for a Kool Place

On the accompanying cover letter with this video, a handwritten note asks "would it be possible to have someone review the film who has some idea what it's about?" --failing to add that said reviewer should be stoned out of his everlovin' gourd. Wrapped in a tie-dye hand-painted video jacket, personally autographed by Ken Kesey (which I will always cherish), Intrepid Traveller's first hour is a home video (and I do mean "home video" in the truest sense) that offers Episode 1 of an incoherent chronicle following Kesey and his fellow Pranksters across America in 1964 on the infamous magic bus nicknamed "Further." A two-minute clip featuring Beat legend Neal Cassady's hyper shenanigans, or the bus getting stuck in Arizona, or maybe the disembodied outstretched hand loaded with fired-up reefers, would have made for a nicely surreal short montage--but an hour of this stuff will have even the most devoted flower child (sans chemical substances) saying, "wow, man, I guess you had to have been there." (Tom Wolfe's 1968 The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test did a much better job of shaping the Pranksters' odyssey into a comprehensible form.) The second hour of the tape is a technically better (though repetitious and relentlessly commercial) look at Kesey and Co. on a three week tour of Britain and Ireland searching for Merlin and putting on a largely impromptu show in various venues. Academic libraries may want to consider, since the first hour is comprised of primary source material, as they say. However, others can safely pass on this maddeningly meandering road trip. Aud: C, P. (R. Pitman)