Critical

The Age called it "quite a pleasant adventure for the younger set" but Lee Robinson "slow paces the indoor talk which is too formal and deliberate for a telly-raised generation. In fact, some snipping with the scissors would do wonders here, even if it meant sacrificing the "A" feature length the producers aimed for."^[5]

Filmink thought it "made the cardinal error of barely using Skippy in the film."^[6]

Box office

The film failed to match the popularity of the TV series and was not a box office success.^[3] John McCallum later claimed they:

Got the money back on the film but we thought it would be a bigger success in the cinema. If they could see it for nothing at home, the Mums and Dads weren't too keen to take the kids and pay at the cinema. We sold it to the Children's Film Foundation in England and they did well with it. They cut it down to a 60-minute version and played in Saturday mornings in the cinemas.^[7]

In 1976 Robinson said the film had been sold to network television in the US but had not recouped its costs and was "unlikely to" although he felt the short version "was a very good film... it really goes crack along." Robinson put the financial failure down to the fact the series was still being made at the time.^[8]