The Little Rascal/Our Gang Comedies

Yesterday I received the Warner Bros. Archive Collection "The Our Gang Collection." These are the Our Gang theatrical shorts made between 1938-1944 after Hal Roach sold the property to MGM.

The group starts out okay, but the spirit of the Hal Roach shorts starts to drop away as the gang becomes respectable and the plots start to become heavy handed with lessons learned. In one of the early MGM shorts, the gang knocks a baseball through a person's window and they all come to the door to politely apologize.

I've read that after the longtime Our Gang director left (to return to Hal Roach Studios), MGM would use the Our Gang shorts as testing grounds for new directors.

Spanky, Alfalfa, Darla, Buckwheat and Porky are present at the initial switch (Spanky was actually brought back out of retirement), but all except Buckwheat leave as the set continues. Porky is replaced by Mickey Gubitosi (the future Robert Blake) and Alfalfa (who was 13 by that point) is replaced by Froggy.

I really only ordered this set to be completist. Last year, I picked up "The Little Rascals: The Complete Collection" from Genius Entertainment that contained the 80 sound Our Gang comedies from 1929-1938. This is the much better set, since the Hal Roach films are superior and there are some extras included (including a few of the silent shorts.)

That's not to say the MGM shorts are terrible...

If you've ever wondered, the shorts were always known as the Our Gang comedies, but after Roach sold the property to MGM, they informed Roach that he could no longer use the name Our Gang when re-releasing his shorts. Eventually Roach started branding them "The Little Rascals."

The big irony to me was that the Little Rascals set describes itself as "must have entertainment for a new generation to discover" while the Our Gang Collection sternly warns "The Our Gang Collection Is Intended for the Adult Collector and is Not Suitable for Children."

The MGM shorts are far tamer than the Roach shorts! The Little Rascals set does have a featurette touching on the racial stereotypes depicted in some of the films.

It's kind of a bummer that this aspect so overshadows these shorts that they are now considered "not suitable for children." 

That said, it's hard not to be shocked by some of the racial stereotypes (when I watched these on TV growing up, they were heavily edited.) Even in the MGM shorts, there are still watermelon jokes. 

There's one short that centers around Mickey waiting for the doctor to deliver what he hopes is a baby brother (since he has two sisters.) While waiting, he looks at an almanac and reads the statistic "Every fourth child born is Chinese" and is convinced that his baby brother will be Chinese. At least they soften this by having Spanky introduce Mickey to a Chinese kid so that Mickey can determine that Chinese kids are okay. (In the end, the doctor delivers twin girls, to Mickey's dismay.)

I don't have children, so I can't really say whether or not I would deem these "suitable." I'd like to think that I would have instilled my child with enough of a sense that racism is wrong that they could recognize it when they see it.

The negatives aside, the Hal Roach shorts especially are really funny even now and it's no surprise that the Our Gang comedies lasted for 22 years.