Rarely has 101 minutes seemed longer than in this Hollywood nostalgia piece about an idyllic summer in the life of nine baseball-mad kids who play on a vacant lot near their homes.

Almost nothing of interest happens in the first 70 minutes of the film, but stay tuned for a last two reels of Sylvester and Tweety Pie-style slapstick, as the kids resort to various home-made mechanical contraptions in their efforts to retrieve a valuable baseball from a junkyard guarded by a legendary ferocious dog.