The Kidnappers Foil is the name of several American short films, made by Melton Barker between the 1930s and 1970s.
Each iteration featured small-town children as actors (a different small town in each version), the parents of whom paid Barker a fee in exchange for appearing in the film.
The Texas Archive of the Moving Image holds a collection of these itinerant films and hosts Internet resources for those who appeared in them as children.
The surviving copies were added as a group to the National Film Registry in 2012 being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and recommended for preservation.
A few weeks after filming, the town would screen the 15- to 20-minute picture to the delight of the local audience.