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» "The Little Rascals" redirects here. For other uses, see The Little Rascals (disambiguation).:
This article is about the film series. For the 1922 silent short subject, see Our Gang (film). For the novel by Philip Roth see Our Gang (novel).
Our Gang, also known as
The Little Rascals or
Hal Roach's Rascals, was a long-lived series of
American comedy short films about a group of poor neighborhood
children and the adventures they'd together. Created by comedy
producer Hal Roach,
Our Gang was produced at the Roach studio starting in 1922 as a silent short subject series. Roach changed distributors from
Pathé to
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in 1927, went to sound in 1929, and continued production until 1938, when he sold the series to MGM. MGM in turn continued producing the comedies until 1944. A total of 220 shorts and one feature film,
General Spanky, were eventually produced, featuring over forty-one
child actors. In the mid-1950s, the 80 Roach-produced shorts with sound were syndicated for
television under the title
The Little Rascals, as MGM retained the rights to the
Our Gang trademark.
The series, one of the best-known and most successful in
cinema history, is noted for showing children behaving in a relatively natural way. While child actors are often groomed to imitate adult acting styles, steal scenes, or deliver "cute" performances, Hal Roach and original
director Robert F. McGowan worked to film the unaffected, raw nuances apparent in regular kids.
Our Gang also notably put
boys,
girls,
whites, and
blacks together in a group as equals, something that "broke new ground," according to film historian
Leonard Maltin. Such a thing had never been done before in cinema, but was commonplace after the success of
Our Gang.
About the series
Unlike many other motion pictures featuring children that are based in
fantasy, producer/creator Hal Roach rooted
Our Gang in real life: the majority of the kids were poor, and the gang was often put at odds with snobbish rich kids, officious adults and parents, and other such adversaries. The series was notable in that the gang included both
African-Americans and
females in leading parts at a time when
discrimination against both groups was commonplace.
Directorial approach
Senior
director Robert F. McGowan helmed most of the
Our Gang shorts until 1933, assisted by his nephew
Anthony Mack. He worked hard to develop a style that allowed the kids to be as natural as possible, downplaying the importance of the filmmaking equipment.
Scripts were written for the shorts by the Hal Roach comedy writing staff, which included at various times
Leo McCarey,
Frank Capra,
Walter Lantz, and
Frank Tashlin, among others. The kids, some of them too young to read, very rarely saw the scripts; instead McGowan would explain the scene to be filmed to each kid right before it was shot, directing the children using a
megaphone and encouraging
improvisation. The four black child actors who held main-character roles in the series were
Ernie "Sunshine Sammy" Morrison,
Allen "Farina" Hoskins,
Matthew "Stymie" Beard, and
Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas. Ernie Morrison was, in fact, the first black actor signed to a long-term contract in
Hollywood history, and was the first major black star in Hollywood history as well.
The black children in
Our Gang often epitomized the early
Hollywood pickaninny stereotype. These characters provided
comic relief by speaking a mangled form of
English, and by frequently being so frightened that either their hair stood on end, or they turned white with fear (a
special effect created with negative film exposure techniques). The black children's fathers were perpetually mentioned as being in and out of jail, and the children themselves habitually ate
watermelon and
fried chicken in the shorts.
Comedian Eddie Murphy controversially parodied Buckwheat and the stereotypical aspects of his character in a series of skits for
Saturday Night Live.
In their adult years, Ernie Morrison, Matthew Beard, and Billie Thomas became some of
Our Gang's staunchest defenders, maintaining that its integrated cast and innocent story lines were far from
racist. They explained that the white children's characters in the series were similarly
stereotyped: the "freckled kid," the "fat kid," the "pretty blond girl," and the "mischievous toddler." "We were just a group of kids who were having
fun," Stymie Beard recalled. Ernie Morrison stated that "when it came to race, Hal Roach was
color-blind". Other minorities, including
Asian Americans (Sing Joy, Allen Tong, and Edward Zoo Hoo) and
Italian Americans (
Mickey Gubitosi), were also depicted in the series, with varying levels of stereotyping.
History
Early years
According to Roach, the idea for
Our Gang came to him in 1921, when he was auditioning a child actress to appear in one of his films. The girl was, in his opinion, overly made up and overly rehearsed, and Roach patiently waited for the audition to be over. After the girl and her mother left the office, Roach looked out of his window to a lumberyard across the street, where he saw a group of children having an argument. The children had all taken sticks from the lumberyard to play with, but the smallest kid had taken the biggest stick, and the others were trying to force him to give it to the biggest kid. After realizing that he'd been watching the kids bicker for 15 minutes, Roach thought a short film series about kids just being themselves might be a success.
Under the supervision of
Charley Chase, work began on the first two-reel shorts in the new "kids-and-pets" series, which was to be called
Hal Roach's Rascals, later that year. Director
Fred Newmeyer helmed the first version of the pilot film, entitled
Our Gang, but Roach scrapped Newmeyer's work and had former
fireman Robert F. McGowan re-shoot the short. Roach tested it at various theaters around Hollywood. The attendees were very receptive, and the press clamored for "lots more of those 'Our Gang' comedies." The colloquial usage of the term
Our Gang led to its becoming the series' second (yet more popular) official title, with the title cards reading "
Our Gang Comedies: Hal Roach presents
His Rascals in..." The series was officially called both
Our Gang and
Hal Roach's Rascals until 1932, when
Our Gang became the sole title of the series.
The first cast of
Our Gang kids was recruited primarily from children recommended to Roach by studio employees, including photographer Gene Kornman's daughter
Mary Kornman, their friends' son
Mickey Daniels, Roach child actor
Ernie "Sunshine Sammy" Morrison, and family friends
Allen "Farina" Hoskins,
Jack Davis,
Jackie Condon, and
Joe Cobb. Most of the early shorts were shot outdoors and on location, and also featured a menagerie of comic animal characters, such as Dinah the Mule.
Roach's distributor
Pathé released
One Terrible Day, the fourth short to be produced for the series, as the first
Our Gang short on
September 10,
1922; the pilot
Our Gang wasn't released until
November 5. The
Our Gang series was a success from the start, with the kids' naturalism, the funny animal actors, and McGowan's direction making a successful combination. The shorts did well at the box office, and by the end of the decade the
Our Gang kids were pictured on numerous product endorsements.
The biggest
Our Gang stars in this period were Sunshine Sammy, around whom the series was structured; Mickey Daniels; Mary Kornman; and little Farina, who eventually became both the most popular member of the 1920s gang, and the most popular African-American child star of the 1920s. Mickey and Mary were also very popular, and were often paired together in both
Our Gang and a later teenaged version of the series called
The Boy Friends, which Roach produced from 1930 to 1932. Other early
Our Gang kids were
Eugene "Pineapple" Jackson, Scooter Lowry, and
Andy Samuel.
Changing distributors
After Sammy, Mickey, and Mary left the series in the mid-1920s, the
Our Gang series entered a transitional period. McGowan was often sick and unable to work on the series, leaving nephew
Robert A. McGowan (credited as Anthony Mack) to direct many of the shorts from this period. The Mack-directed shorts are considered to be among the lesser entries in the series. New faces included
Bobby "Wheezer" Hutchins,
Harry Spear,
Jean Darling, and
Mary Ann Jackson, while stalwart Farina served as the series' anchor.
Also at this time, the
Our Gang kids acquired an
American Pit Bull Terrier with a ring around his eye; originally named "Pansy", the dog soon became known as
Pete the Pup, the most famous
Our Gang pet. During this period, Hal Roach ended his distribution arrangement with the Pathé company, instead releasing future products through newly formed
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. MGM released its first
Our Gang comedy in September 1927. The move to MGM offered Roach larger budgets, and the chance to have his films packaged with MGM features to the giant
Loews Theatres chain.
Some of the shorts around this time, particularly
Spook Spoofing (1928, one of only two three-reelers in the
Our Gang canon) contained extended scenes of the gang tormenting and teasing Farina, scenes which helped spur the claims of racism which many other shorts didn't warrant. These shorts marked the departure of
Jackie Condon, who had been with the group from the beginning of the series.
The sound era
Starting in 1928,
Our Gang comedies were distributed with
phonographic discs that contained synchronized music-and-sound-effect tracks for the shorts. In spring 1929, the Roach sound stages were converted for sound recording, and
Our Gang made its "
all-talking" debut in April 1929 with the three-reel
Small Talk. It took a year for McGowan and the gang to fully adjust to talking pictures, during which time they lost Joe, Jean, and Harry, and added
Norman "Chubby" Chaney,
Dorothy DeBorba,
Matthew "Stymie" Beard,
Donald Haines, and
Jackie Cooper. Jackie proved to be the personality the series had been missing since Mickey left, and he was featured in three 1930/1931
Our Gang shorts,
Teacher's Pet,
School's Out, and
Love Business.These three shorts explored Jackie's crush on the new schoolteacher Miss Crabtree, played by
June Marlowe. Jackie soon won the lead role in
Paramount's feature film
Skippy, and Roach sold his contract to MGM in 1931.
Beginning with
When the Wind Blows, background music scores were added to the soundtracks of most of the
Our Gang films. Initially, the music consisted of orchestral versions of then popular tunes. This type of scoring was used in the next couple episodes.
Marvin Hatley had become music director of Hal Roach studios in 1929.
Leroy Shield joined as a part-time studio musical director in mid 1930. At this point Hatley and Shield began composing and playing their own jazz influenced music for the films. This music became a recognizable trademark of
Our Gang,
Laurel and Hardy, and the other Roach series and films. Hatley's and Shield's
jazz-influenced scores, which made their debut with
Pups is Pups (1930), are particularly associated with
Our Gang.
Teacher's Pet marked the first appearance of the now-popular
Our Gang theme song, "Good Old Days", composed by Leroy Shield and featuring a notable
saxophone solo. Shield and Hatley's scores would support
Our Gang's on-screen action regularly through 1934, after which series entries with background scores became less frequent.
In 1930, Roach began production on
The Boy Friends, a short-subject series which was essentially a teenaged version of
Our Gang. Featuring
Our Gang alumni Mickey Daniels and Mary Kornman among its cast,
The Boy Friends was produced by Roach for two years, with fifteen installments in total.
Transition
Jackie Cooper left
Our Gang in early 1931 at the cusp of another major shift in the lineup, as Farina, Chubby, and Mary Ann all departed a few months afterward.
Our Gang entered another transitional period, similar to that of the mid-1920s. Stymie, Wheezer, and Dorothy carried the series during this period, aided by veteran child actors
Dickie Moore and
Kendall "Breezy Brisbane" McComas. Unlike the mid-20s period, McGowan was able to sustain the quality of the series, with the help of the kids and the Roach writing staff.
New Roach discovery
George "Spanky" McFarland joined the gang in 1931 at the age of three and, excepting a brief hiatus during the summer of 1938, remained an
Our Gang kid for the next eleven years. At first appearing as the tag-along toddler of the group, and later finding an accomplice in Scotty Beckett in 1934, Spanky quickly became Our Gang's biggest child star. He won parts in a number of outside features, appeared in many of the now-numerous
Our Gang product endorsements and spin-off merchandise items, and popularized the expressions "Okey-dokey!" and "Okey-doke!"
In late 1933, Robert McGowan, worn out from the stress of working on the kids' comedies, left the series and the Roach studio, going over to direct features at Paramount. German-born
Gus Meins assumed McGowan's role starting with
Hi'-Neighbor! in 1934, working with assistant director
Gordon Douglas and alternating directorial duties with Fred Newmeyer. At this point, the films became more dialogue intensive. While most episodes continued to use background music, several only featured partial scoring, while many others were released without any incidental score accompaniment.
At this point,
Wally Albright and
Jackie Lynn Taylor joined the gang, as did
Billie Thomas, who within a few months of joining would begin playing the character of Stymie's sister "Buckwheat" (even though Thomas was a male). The Buckwheat character morphed subtley into a male in 1935 after Stymie left the series. The same year,
Carl Switzer and his brother Harold joined the gang after impressing Roach with an impromptu performance at the studio commissary, the
Our Gang Cafe, which was open to the public. While Harold would eventually be relegated to the role of a background player, Carl, nicknamed "Alfalfa", became Scotty Beckett's replacement as Spanky's sidekick.
Darla Hood and
Eugene "Porky" Lee also joined the gang in 1935.
The final Roach years
Our Gang was hugely successful during the 1920s and the early 1930s. However, by 1934, movie theater owners were increasingly dropping two-reel (twenty minute) comedies like
Our Gang and the
Laurel and Hardy series from their bills, and running
double feature programs instead. Although the
Laurel and Hardy series was discontinued in mid-1935 (and Laurel and Hardy moved into feature films full-time), MGM head
Louis B. Mayer urged Hal Roach to continue making the
Our Gang shorts. Roach agreed, and began producing
Our Gang comedies as one-reel shorts (ten-minutes in length instead of twenty). The first one-reel
Our Gang short,
Bored of Education, won the
Academy Award for Best Live-Action Short Subject (One Reel) in 1936.
Bored of Education also marked the directorial debut of former assistant director Gordon Douglas.
Also in 1936, the first (and only) full-length feature film starring the
Our Gang kids was released, entitled
General Spanky. Directed by Douglas and Fred Newmeyer, it starred Spanky, Buckwheat, and Alfalfa in a sentimental, Shirley Temple-esque story set during the
Civil War. The film focused more on its adult leads (Phillip Holmes and
Rosina Lawrence) than the kids, and was a box office disappointment.
After years of gradual cast changes, the troupe standardized in 1936. Most casual fans of
Our Gang are particularly familiar with this incarnation of the cast: Spanky, Alfalfa, Darla, Buckwheat, and Porky, with neighborhood bullies Butch and Woim and bookworm Waldo.
Tommy Bond, an off-and-on member of the gang since 1932, returned to the series as Butch beginning with the 1937 short
Glove Taps.
Sidney Kibrick played Butch's crony, The Woim.
Glove Taps also featured the first appearance of
Darwood Kaye as the bespectacled Waldo. In later shorts, both Butch and Waldo would become Alfalfa's main rivals in his pursuit of Darla's affections. Other familiar situations in these mid-to-late 1930s shorts include the "He-Man Woman Haters Club" from
Hearts Are Thumps and
Mail and Female (both 1937), the Laurel and Hardy-ish interaction between Alfalfa and Spanky, Alfalfa and Darla's on-again-off-again romance, and the comic team of Porky and Buckwheat.
Roach produced one last two-reel
Our Gang short, the lavish
Our Gang Follies of 1938, in 1937 as a
parody of MGM's
Broadway Melody of 1938. In
Follies of 1938, Alfalfa, who aspires to be an
opera singer, falls asleep and dreams that his old pal Spanky has become the rich owner of a swanky
Broadway nightclub, where Darla and Buckwheat perform and make "hundreds and thousands of dollars."
As the profit margins continued to decline due to double features, Roach could no longer afford to produce the series, and sold the entire
Our Gang unit (including the rights to the name and the contracts for the actors, writers, and director Douglas) to MGM in May 1938.
The MGM era
The MGM-produced
Our Gang shorts were not as well-received as the Roach-produced shorts had been, due to both MGM's inexperience with the brand of
slapstick comedy Our Gang was famous for and MGM's insistence on keeping Alfalfa, Spanky, and Buckwheat in the series until they were in their early teens. After a frustrated Gordon Douglas left MGM to return to Roach after completing only two films, MGM began using
Our Gang as a training ground for future feature directors;
George Sidney,
Edward Cahn, Herbert Glazer, and
Cy Endfield all worked on
Our Gang before moving on to features. Nearly all of the 52 MGM-produced
Our Gangs were written by former Roach director Hal Law and former junior director Robert A. McGowan (also known as Anthony Mack, the elder Robert McGowan's nephew). McGowan was credited for these shorts as "Robert McGowan"; as a result, moviegoers have been confused for decades about whether this Robert McGowan and the senior director of the same name back at Roach were two separate people or not.
The
Our Gang films produced by MGM are considered by many
Our Gang historians, and even the
Our Gang kids themselves, to be lesser films than the Roach entries. The kids' performances are often stilted, with the fully scripted dialogue now being recited stiffly instead of spoken naturally. The stories were more heavy-handed, with adult situations driving the action, and the films usually incorporated a moral, a civics lesson, or a patriotic theme.
Porky was replaced in 1939 by Mickey Gubitosi, later better known by the stage name of
Robert Blake. Butch, Waldo, and Alfalfa all left the series in 1940, and
Billy "Froggy" Laughlin (with his
Popeye-esque trick voice) and
Janet Burston were added to the cast. By the end of 1941, Darla had also departed from the series, and Spanky followed her within a year. Buckwheat remained in the cast until the end of the series as the only holdover from the Roach era.
Exhibitors noticed the drop in quality, and often complained that the series was slipping. When six of the 13 shorts released between 1942 and 1943 sustained losses rather than turning profits, MGM discontinued
Our Gang, releasing the final short,
Dancing Romeo, on
April 29,
1944.
Since 1937,
Our Gang had been featured as a licensed
comic strip in the
UK comic The Dandy, drawn by
Dudley D. Watkins. Starting in 1942, MGM licensed
Our Gang to
Dell Comics for the publication of
Our Gang Comics, featuring the gang,
Barney Bear, and
Tom and Jerry. The strips in
The Dandy ended three years after the demise of the
Our Gang shorts, in 1947.
Our Gang Comics outlasted the series by five years, finally changing its name to
Tom and Jerry Comics in 1949. In 2006,
Fantagraphics Books began issuing a series of volumes reprinting the
Our Gang stories, most of which were written and drawn by
Pogo creator
Walt Kelly.
Later years and The Little Rascals revival
The Little Rascals television package
When Hal Roach sold
Our Gang to MGM, he'd retained the option to buy back the rights to the
Our Gang trademark, provided he didn't produce any more kids' comedies in the
Our Gang vein. In the mid-1940s, he decided that he wanted to create a new film property in the
Our Gang mold, and forfeited his right to buy back the
Our Gang name in order to produce two
Cinecolor featurettes,
Curley and
Who Killed Doc Robbin. Neither film was critically or financially successful, and Roach instead turned his plans toward re-releasing the original
Our Gang comedies.
In 1949, MGM allowed Roach to buy back the rights to the 1927–1938
Our Gang shorts, while retaining the rights to both the
Our Gang films it produced and
General Spanky. As per the terms agreed during the sale, Roach was required to remove the
MGM Lion studio logo and all instances of the names or logos "Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer", "Loews Incorporated" and
Our Gang from the reissued film prints. Using a modified version of the series' original name, Roach packaged the 80 sound
Our Gang shorts as
The Little Rascals.
Monogram Pictures and its successor,
Allied Artists, reissued the films to theaters beginning in 1950. Allied Artists' television department, Interstate Television, syndicated the films to TV in 1955.
Under its new name,
The Little Rascals enjoyed renewed popularity on television, and new
Little Rascals comic books, toys, and other licensed merchandise was made available for purchase. Seeing the potential of the property, MGM began distributing its own
Our Gang shorts to television in 1956, and as a result, the two separate packages of
Our Gang films competed with each other in
syndication for three decades. Some stations bought
both packages and played them alongside each other.
The television rights for the original silent
Pathé Our Gang comedies were sold to National Telepix and other distributors, who distributed the films under titles such as
The Mischief Makers and
Those Lovable Scallawags with Their Gangs.
King World's acquisition and edits
In the 1960s a then-new distributor named
King World Entertainment (now
CBS Television Distribution) returned the films to television, and the success of
The Little Rascals paved the way for King World to become one of the biggest television syndicators in the world; distributing, along with the
Rascals, The Oprah Winfrey Show,
Jeopardy,
Dr. Phil, and
Wheel of Fortune.
In 1971, because of controversy over their presumably racist content, as well as other content deemed to be in bad taste, King World made significant edits to its
Little Rascals TV prints. Many of the series entries were trimmed by two to four minutes, while several others (among them
Spanky,
Bargain Day,
The Pinch Singer and
Mush and Milk) were cut down to nearly half of their original length.
At the same time, eight
Little Rascals shorts were removed from the King World television package altogether.
Lazy Days,
Moan & Groan, Inc., the
Stepin Fetchit-guest-starred
A Tough Winter,
Little Daddy,
A Lad An' A Lamp,
The Kid From Borneo, and
Little Sinner were all deleted from the syndication package because of perceived racism, while
Big Ears (1931) was deleted for dealing with the subject of
divorce. The early talkie
Railroadin' (1929) was never part of the television package, not because of potentially offensive content, but because its sound tracks (recorded on phonographic records) couldn't be found and were considered lost.
In the early 2000s, the 71 films in the King World package were re-edited, reinstating many (though not all) of the edits made in 1971 and the original
Our Gang title cards. These new television prints made their debut on the
American Movie Classics cable network in 2001.
New Little Rascals productions
In 1977,
Norman Lear tried to revive the Rascals franchise, taping three pilot episodes of the
The Little Rascals. The pilots were not bought, but the pilots were notable for giving an early start to
Gary Coleman.
1979 brought
The Little Rascals Christmas Special, an animated
holiday special produced by Murakami-Wolf-Swenson, written by
Romeo Muller and featuring voice work from Darla Hood (who passed away before the special aired) and Matthew "Stymie" Beard.
Hanna-Barbera brought the animated gang back from 1982 to 1984 in a series of
Little Rascals television cartoons for
ABC Saturday Mornings. Many producers, including
Our Gang alumnus
Jackie Cooper, made pilots for new
Our Gang TV shows, but none of them ever went into production.
In 1994,
Amblin Entertainment and
Universal Pictures released
The Little Rascals, a feature film based upon the series and featuring interpretations of classic
Our Gang shorts, including
Hearts are Thumps,
Rushin' Ballet, and
Hi'-Neighbor! The film, directed by
Penelope Spheeris, starred
Travis Tedford as Spanky,
Bug Hall as Alfalfa, and
Ross Bagley as Buckwheat; and featured cameos by
the Olsen twins,
Whoopi Goldberg,
Mel Brooks,
Reba McEntire,
Daryl Hannah,
Donald Trump, and
Raven-Symoné.
The Little Rascals was a moderate success for Universal, bringing in $51,764,950 at the
box office Critics and fans alike were quick to note that no surviving members of the original
Our Gang appeared in the film.
Legacy and influence
The characters in this series became well-known cultural icons, and could often be identified solely by their first names. The characters of Alfalfa, Spanky, Buckwheat, Darla, and Froggy were especially well-known. Like many child actors, the
Our Gang kids were subsequently
typecast and had trouble outgrowing their
Our Gang images.
Several
Our Gang alumni, among them Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer, Scotty Beckett, Norman "Chubby" Chaney, Billy "Froggy" Laughlin, and Bobby "Wheezer" Hutchins, met with untimely deaths before the age of forty. This led to rumors that there was an
Our Gang/Little Rascals "curse", a rumor popularized by a 2002
E! True Hollywood Story documentary entitled
The Curse of the Little Rascals. The
Snopes.com website debunks the rumor that there's an
Our Gang curse, stating that there was no evidence of a pattern of unusual deaths when taking all of the major
Our Gang stars into account, despite the tragic deaths of a select few.
The kids' work in the series went largely unrewarded in later years, although Spanky McFarland received a star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame posthumously in 1994. Neither he nor any of the other
Our Gang kids ever got any
residuals or
royalties from
reruns of the shorts or licensed products with their likenesses. The only remittances they received were their weekly salaries during their time in the gang, which ranged from $40 a week for newcomers to $300 or more a week for stars like Farina, Spanky, and Alfalfa.
One notable exception is Jackie Cooper, who was later nominated for an
Academy Award and had a full career as an adult actor. Cooper is best known today for portraying
Perry White in the
Superman movies starring
Christopher Reeve, as well as for directing episodes of TV series such as
M*A*S*H and
Superboy.
The 1930
Our Gang short
Pups is Pups was deemed "culturally significant" by the United States
Library of Congress, and selected for preservation in the
National Film Registry in 2004.
Imitators, followers, and frauds
Due to the popularity of
Our Gang, a number of imitation kid
comedy short film series were created by competing studios. Among the most notable of these are
The Kiddie Troupers, featuring future comedian
Eddie Bracken;
Baby Burlesks, featuring
Shirley Temple; the
Buster Brown comedies (from which
Our Gang received
Pete the Pup and director
Gus Meins); and
Our Gang's most successful competitor, the
Toonerville Trolley-based
Mickey McGuire series starring
Mickey Rooney. Some less notable imitations series include
The McDougall Alley Gang (
Bray Productions, 1927–1928),
The Us Bunch and
Our Kids.
After its original run was over,
Our Gang continued to inspire works in various media focusing on children. These include, but are not limited to,
Charles M. Schulz's comic strip
Peanuts and films such as
The Bad News Bears (1976),
The Goonies (1985), and
The Sandlot (1993).
In later years, a large number of adults falsely claimed to have been members of
Our Gang. A long list of people, including persons famous in other capacities such as
Nanette Fabray,
Eddie Bracken, and gossip columnist
Joyce Haber have all claimed to be or have been publicly called former
Our Gang kids. Bracken's official biography was once altered to state that he appeared in
Our Gang instead of
The Kiddie Troupers, although he himself had no knowledge of the change. There are many other persons who have falsely claimed to have been
Our Gang kids such as Spanky, Alfalfa, Froggy, and often other characters who never existed.
Among the most notable
Our Gang impostors is
Jack Bothwell, who claimed to have portrayed a character named "Freckles", and went so far as to appear on the game show
To Tell The Truth in 1957 perpetuating this
fraud. Another is
Bill English, a
grocery store employee who appeared on the
October 5 1990, episode of the
ABC investigative
television newsmagazine 20/20 claiming to have been Buckwheat. Following the broadcast, Spanky McFarland informed the media of the
truth, and in December, William Thomas, Jr., the son of the actual actor who played Buckwheat, filed a
lawsuit against ABC for negligence.
Persons and entities named after Our Gang
A number of other groups, companies, and entities have been inspired by or named after
Our Gang. For example, most notably, Phfat Raskals', an
American band, name is a reference to the short, Bubbling Troubles (1939), in which Alfalfa's stomach becomes overly bloated. The
folk-rock group
Spanky and Our Gang was named in honor of the troupe, but had no other connection with it. In addition, there are a number of (unauthorized)
Little Rascals and
Our Gang restaurants and
day care centers in various locations throughout the
United States.
Ren and Stimpy, the animated stars of
Nickelodeon's
The Ren and Stimpy Show, were first created as supporting characters on a proposed cartoon show called
Your Gang about a group of children.
Home video releases and rights to the films
16 mm, VHS, and DVD releases
From the 1960s to the 1980s, copies of all eighty Hal Roach
Little Rascals talkies, and a handful of the silents, were available on 16 mm film through Blackhawk Films. The only edits made to the films were the replacements of the original Our Gang title cards with Little Rascals titles. Like the other Little Rascals distributors, Blackhawk was required to use custom title cards in place of the originals, and the conversion of Railroadin', whose soundtrack couldn't be found, into a silent. In the early 1980s, Blackhawk made two-thirds of the
Little Rascals shorts available by catalog on
VHS home video. Blackhawk Films was acquired in 1983 by
National Telefilm Associates, later renamed
Republic Pictures, who repackaged about thirty
Little Rascals shorts in various VHS compilations for sale in retail stores in 1984.
Cabin Fever Entertainment acquired the
Little Rascals home video rights from Republic in 1993, and between 1994 and 1995 issued all eighty Roach talkies (including a restored sound version of Railroadin') in a twenty-two volume
Little Rascals VHS tape set. Each volume, hosted by film historian
Leonard Maltin, featured four digitally restored and uncut shorts, complete with their original
Our Gang title cards. In 1998, Cabin Fever shut down and sold the
Little Rascals home video rights to
Hallmark Entertainment, who re-issued the first ten volumes of the Cabin Fever VHS set, and released two
Little Rascals DVD compilations. A third DVD, entitled
Little Rascals Collectors' Series Volume III, was issued on
November 15,
2005, and includes ten sound shorts.
Meanwhile, MGM had released several non-comprehensive VHS tapes of its shorts, as well as the feature
General Spanky. There are many other unofficial
Our Gang and
Little Rascals home video collections available from several other distributors, comprising shorts (both silent and sound) which have fallen into the
public domain.
Status of ownership
Currently, the rights to the
Our Gang/
Little Rascals shorts are scattered.
RHI Entertainment (successor-in-interest to
Hallmark Entertainment) owns the copyrights of and holds the theatrical and home video rights to the Roach-produced
Our Gang shorts. RHI acquired these after absorbing
Hal Roach Studios, Roach's estate, and Cabin Fever Entertainment in the late 1990s. King World held the rights to the
Little Rascals trademark and the
Little Rascals television package until 2007. Today King World's rights are with
CBS Television Distribution (which was formed by the merger of King World with
CBS Paramount Domestic Television), which offers both original black-and-white and
colorized prints for syndication. King World/CBS's
Little Rascals package was featured as exclusive programming (in the
United States) for the
American Movie Classics network from August 2001 to December 2003, with
Frankie Muniz as the host.
The MGM-produced
Our Gang shorts,
General Spanky, and the rights to the
Our Gang name have been owned by
Turner Entertainment since 1986. Today, the MGM
Our Gang shorts are distributed for Turner by
Warner Bros. Television Distribution. Turner made a deal with King World in the early 1990s to jointly market the
Little Rascals and
Our Gang films and properties, instead of competing with one another. The MGM
Our Gangs now appear regularly on the
AmericanLife TV Network, and periodically on the
Turner Classic Movies cable network. Most of the MGM
Our Gangs are also available for viewing online at
AOL's
In2TV website.
The widely-circulated rumor that entertainer
Bill Cosby bought up the rights to
Our Gang to keep the racial stereotypes off of television is false. Cosby has never owned any rights to the series at any time.
Our Gang kids, pets, and personnel
For a detailed listing of the Our Gang kids, recurring adult actors, directors, and writers, please see Our Gang personnel.
The following is a listing of the best-known child actors in the
Our Gang comedies. They are grouped by the era during which they joined the gang:
Roach silent period
Roach talkie period
Norman "Chubby" Chaney (1929–1931)
Jackie Cooper (1929–1931)
Dorothy DeBorba (1930–1933)
Matthew "Stymie" Beard (1930–1935)
George "Spanky" McFarland (1932–1942)
Tommy Bond (1932–1934 as Tommy, 1937–1940 as "Butch")
Scotty Beckett (1934–1935)
Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas (1934–1944)
Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer (1935–1940)
Darla Hood (1935–1941)
Eugene "Porky" Lee (1935–1939)
Darwood "Waldo" Kaye (1937–1940)
MGM period
Mickey Gubitosi (Robert Blake) (1939–1944)
Billy "Froggy" Laughlin (1940–1944)
Janet Burston (1940–1944)
Notable Our Gang comedies
For a complete filmography, see Our Gang filmography.
The following is a listing of selected Our Gang comedies, considered by Leonard Maltin and Richard W. Bann (in their book The Little Rascals: The Life and Times of Our Gang) to be among the best and most important in the series.
1923: The Champeen and Derby Day
1924: High Society
1925: Your Own Back Yard and One Wild Ride
1929: Cat, Dog & Co. and Small Talk
1930: The First Seven Years, Pups Is Pups, Teacher's Pet, and School's Out
1931: Love Business, Little Daddy, Fly My Kite, and Dogs Is Dogs
1932: Readin' and Writin', The Pooch, Hook And Ladder, Free Wheeling, and Birthday Blues
1933: The Kid From Borneo, Mush and Milk, and Bedtime Worries
1934: Hi' Neighbor! and Mama's Little Pirate
1935: Beginner's Luck and Our Gang Follies Of 1936
1936: Divot Diggers, Bored of Education, and General Spanky
1937: Reunion In Rhythm, Glove Taps, Hearts Are Thumps, Rushin' Ballet, Night 'N' Gales, Mail And Female, and Our Gang Follies of 1938
1938: Three Men in a Tub and Hide and Shriek
1939: Alfalfa's Aunt and Cousin Wilbur
1940: Goin' Fishin' and Kiddie Kure
1942: Going To Press
Footnotes
Further Information
Get more info on 'Little Rascals'.
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