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It has now been more than fifty years since The Little Rascals / Our Gang short subjects came to television.
A staple of local broadcasts in the fifties and sixties, the Our Gang comedies have virtually disappeared from TV today. In some measure that's because they may be perceived as racially insensitive; more likely it's because they have very little relevance to our modern society - or today's kids.
The very first 'Gang' in 1922 consisted of Allen "Farina" Hoskins (the black kid), Mickey Daniels (all-American freckle-faced boy), Joe Cobb (the fat kid), Mary Kornman (the pretty girl), and Pete the dog (with a thick, black circle painted around his right eye).
As the kids grew up they were replaced by a younger crop, including: Jean Darling, Jackie Cooper, Tommy "Butch" Bond, Darla Hood, Darwood "Waldo" Kaye, Robert "Wheezer" Hutchins, Mary Ann Jackson, George "Spanky" McFarland, Dickie Moore, Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer, Norman "Chubby" Chaney, William "Buckwheat" Thomas, Matthew "Stymie" Beard, and Mickey Gubitossi (aka Robert Blake) among many others.
Viewed from the perspective of today's over-indulgent parents and their ridiculously pampered offspring, these films take on a whole other layer of humor.
In the early productions the kids were often portrayed as orphans and neglected, dirt-scratching urchins roaming the neighborhood with unattended babies and an unleashed pit bull. While avoiding the police and truant officers attempting to coral them into school, the gang was frequently plagued by vagrants, burglars, carnival workers, larcenous circus midgets, snotty rich kids and drunken monkeys.
The early shorts weren't pretty but the world was a harsh place during the depression. Stymie, Dickie, baby Spanky and the gang typically found their fun in dusty lots behind crummy looking outbuildings, railroad tracks, and the depressingly dilapidated shacks they lived in.
Fly My Kite, made soon after the series went from silent to talkies in 1929, illustrated perfectly the environment the kids inhabited. In the film, the Gang's friend "Grandma" is being evicted to the Poor Farm by her no good son-in-law. She gives Chubby some "worthless bonds" for his kite that turn out to be worth a fortune, leading the kids to have to beat the crook half to death to get them back.
Fathers were more often than not presented as loudmouthed louts or prissy simpletons; mothers were gold-digging flappers, argumentative and parentally uninvolved. That is, until one of the kids ends up at the bottom of a well ("Well, well, Spud fell in the well!") or the authorities show up.
These films were made for a different era, so there was some discussion in the 1950s as to whether scenes with bug-eyed, slow-talking Negroes would be appropriate for broadcast. But for every scene that might be considered offensive today there were dozens of examples of the racially mixed cast all getting along as equals; they even went to school together. Their world was fully integrated while the real world was thoroughly segregated; ethnicity just wasn't an issue in the films.
As an example of this color blindness, in the 1933 short The Kid from Borneo, Dickie, a white kid, mistakenly (but wholeheartedly) believes his uncle is an untamed African jungle man. When he shows a picture of his 'uncle' to his best friend Stymie, an African-American lad, this dialogue followed:
Our Gang's StymieDickie: "Hey fellows c'mere. Take a look at our uncle. Pop says he's plenty wild, too."
Stymie: "He sho' do look wild. What makes him so black?"
Dickie: "Mom says he's the black sheep of the family."
Stymie: "Them horns make him look more like a goat!"
Films shot by the Hal Roach studio just before the franchise moved to MGM in 1938 were considerably slicker than the crude, early films; now episodes revolved around the most familiar core group of kids that included Alfalfa, Spanky, Darla, Butch, Froggy (and the He-Man Women-Haters club and "I'm the Barber of Saville"). The shorts began reflecting a more modern American family ideal. As a result, parents were less likely to be depicted as lousy role models.
The MGM shorts were slicker still, the gang was given the full-on studio high gloss treatment. The MGM shorts featured the same core group of kids (Alfalfa, Spanky, Darla, Butch, etc.) but didn't share the hardscrabble nature of the original run.
By the time the series ended in 1944, the 'Gang' were jaded city slickers who couldn't cope when dropped into a rural setting; theirs was a world of elaborate stage shows, fundraisers, radio broadcasts, film studios and - gasp - schoolwork!
The MGM scripts were uniformly flat, predictable and hindered by the fact that the kids were well into their teens and not so cute anymore.
MGM evidently believed there was a flicker life left in the franchise. Carl 'Alfalfa' Switzer and Tommy 'Butch' Bond starred in a short-lived series of films as part of the Gas House Kids, a teen Little Rascals / Bowery Boys type concept that failed to catch on.
TV TIME
Our Gang Comedies castWhen Our Gang initially arrived on television, it was retitled The Little Rascals. The series had been called Our Gang from the beginning; when creator Hal Roach (Laurel & Hardy) sold the franchise to MGM in 1938, he retained the rights to the films he had produced up to that point.
Roach sold his package of shorts to TV in 1954, he called them The Little Rascals because MGM owned the name Our Gang.
The success of the Roach comedies on TV led to MGM releasing their Our Gang shorts to television a couple of years later as a competing package.
Local TV stations were starved for content to fill the daytime hours in the mid-fifties and The Little Rascals / Our Gang (along with Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges and old westerns) was a relatively inexpensive property to air. After all, the cast members didn't have to be paid. No one could have envisioned that these shorts, which were shot two decades earlier, would enjoy a second life on a whole new entertainment medium.
Because they timed out between ten and twenty minutes each, many stations around the country employed local hosts who could provide entertainment between the Our Gang films.