Contemporary offbeat documentary with ‘a seriously unreliable narrator’ (according to the filmmaker) tells the bizarre story of John Romulus Brinkley, an infamous Kansas doctor who in 1917 discovers that he can cure impotence by transplanting goat testicles into men. A combination of hand-drawn animated reenactments, interviews with specialists and archival footage shows Brinkley’s rise from poverty and obscurity to the heights of celebrity, wealth and influence, together with his wife and son Johnnyboy. Along the way, he builds the world’s most powerful radio station and annoys the heck out of a lot of people so that Dr. Morris Fishbein of the American Medical Association in his fight against quackery pulls out all the stops to remove Brinkley from his post and the Federal Radio Commission blocks his radio station.

This program screened as part of Haff 2016