The Little Rascals Full Movie

[Klacee Sawatzky]

OurGang (also known as The Little Rascals or Hal Roach's Rascals) is an American series of comedy short films chronicling a group of poor neighborhood children and their adventures. Created by film producer Hal Roach, also the producer of the Laurel and Hardy films, Our Gang shorts were produced from 1922 to 1944, spanning the silent film and early sound film periods of American cinema. Our Gang is noted for showing children behaving in a relatively natural way; Roach and original director Robert F. McGowan worked to film the unaffected, raw nuances apparent in regular children, rather than have them imitate adult acting styles. The series also broke new ground by portraying white and black children interacting as equals during the Jim Crow era of racial segregation in the United States.[1]

The franchise began in 1922 as a silent short subject series produced by the Roach studio and released by Path Exchange. Roach changed distributors from Path to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in 1927, and the series entered its most popular period after converting to sound in 1929. Production continued at Roach until 1938, when the Our Gang production unit was sold to MGM, where production continued until 1944. Across 220 short films and a feature-film spin-off, General Spanky, the Our Gang series featured more than 41 child actors as regular members of its cast.

As MGM retained the rights to the Our Gang trademark after buying the series, the Roach-produced Our Gang sound films were re-released to theaters and syndicated for television under the title The Little Rascals.

Unlike many motion pictures featuring children and based in fantasy, producer/creator Hal Roach rooted Our Gang in real life: most of the children were poor, and the gang was often at odds with snobbish "rich kids", officious adults, parents, and other such adversaries.[1]

Senior director Robert F. McGowan helmed most of the Our Gang shorts until 1933, assisted by his nephew Anthony Mack. McGowan worked to develop a style that allowed the children 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.[2] The children, some too young to read, rarely saw the scripts; instead, McGowan would explain the scene to be filmed to each child immediately before it was shot, directing the children using a megaphone and encouraging improvisation.[2]

When sound came in at the end of the 1920s, McGowan modified his approach slightly, but scripts were not adhered to until McGowan left the series. Later Our Gang directors, such as Gus Meins and Gordon Douglas, streamlined the approach to McGowan's methods to meet the demands of the increasingly sophisticated movie industry of the mid-to-late 1930s.[2] Douglas, in particular, had to streamline his films, as he directed Our Gang after Roach halved the running times of the shorts from two reels (20 minutes) to one reel (10 minutes).[2]

As children aged out of their roles, they were replaced by new children, usually from the Los Angeles area. Eventually Our Gang talent scouting employed large-scale national contests in which thousands of children tried out for an open role. For example, Norman Chaney ("Chubby"), Matthew Beard ("Stymie"), and Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas all won contests to become members of the cast: Chaney replaced Joe Cobb, Beard replaced Allen Hoskins ("Farina"), and Thomas replaced Beard.[3][4][5]

Even when there was no talent search, the studio was bombarded by requests from parents who were sure their children were perfect for the series. Among them were the future child stars Mickey Rooney and Shirley Temple, neither of whom made it past the audition.[6]

The Our Gang series, produced during the Jim Crow era, is notable for being one of the first in cinema history in which African Americans and White Americans were portrayed as equals. The five black child actors who held main roles in the series were Ernie Morrison, Eugene Jackson, Allen Hoskins, Matthew Beard and Billie Thomas. Ernie Morrison was, in fact, the first black actor signed to a long-term contract in Hollywood history[7] and the first major black star in Hollywood history.[8]

The African-American characters have often been criticized as racial stereotypes.[9][10] The Black children spoke (or were indicated as speaking via text titles in the case of the silent entries) in a stereotypical "Negro dialect", and several controversial gags revolved directly around their skin color: Matthew Beard's Stymie character sweating jet-black ink,[11] Billie Thomas's Buckwheat character being given fake "white measles" instead of dark ones and supposedly turned into a monkey,[12][13] and so forth. One early Our Gang short, Lodge Night (1924), revolves around the kids forming a parody club based on the Ku Klux Klan (though the Black children are still allowed to join).[14]

In their adult years, actors Morrison, Beard, and Thomas defended the series, arguing that the white characters in the series were similarly stereotyped: the "freckle-faced kid", the "fat kid", the "neighborhood bully", the "pretty blond girl", and the "mischievous toddler". In an interview on Tom Snyder's The Tomorrow Show in 1974, Matthew Beard said of his time in the series that "I feel it was great. Some of the lines I had to say I didn't like, but I never look at it like that. I just try to look at it as mostly a fun thing. We were just a group of kids who were having fun."[15] In a separate interview, Ernie Morrison stated, "When it came to race, Hal Roach was color-blind."[16]

Despite the stereotyping and racial gags, Our Gang's integrated cast caused it to be disliked by certain theater owners in the southern United States.[14] Early in the existence of Our Gang, these theater owners complained to Path that Morrison and Hoskins had too much screen time and their prominence in the shorts would offend white audiences.[14] A later Our Gang spin-off film, Curley (1947), was banned by the Memphis, Tennessee censor board for showing black and white children in school together, a characteristic common to even the earlier shorts.[17] Other minorities, including Asian Americans Sing Joy, Allen Tong (also known as Alan Dong), and Edward Soo Hoo, as well as Italian-American actor Mickey Gubitosi (later known as Robert Blake), were depicted in the series with varying levels of stereotyping.[18]

According to Roach, the idea for Our Gang came to him in 1921, when he was auditioning a child actress to appear in a film. The girl was, in his opinion, overly made up and overly rehearsed, and Roach 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 some children having an argument. The children had all taken sticks from the lumberyard to play with, but the smallest child had the biggest stick, and the others were trying to force him to give it to the biggest child. After realizing that he had been watching the children bicker for 15 minutes, Roach thought a short film series about children just being themselves might be a success.[19]

Our Gang also had its roots in an aborted Roach short-subject series revolving around the adventures of a black boy called "Sunshine Sammy", played by Ernie Morrison.[20] Theater owners then were wary of booking shorts focused on a black boy,[20] and the series ended after just one entry, The Pickaninny, was produced.[20] Morrison's "Sunshine Sammy" instead became one of the foci of the new Our Gang series.

Under the supervision of Charley Chase, work began on the first two-reel shorts in the new "kids-and-pets" series, to be called Hal Roach's Rascals, later that year. Director Fred C. Newmeyer helmed the first pilot film, entitled Our Gang, but Roach scrapped Newmeyer's work and had former fireman Robert F. McGowan reshoot the short. Roach tested it at several 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..."[21] 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 was recruited primarily of children recommended to Roach by studio employees, with the exception of Ernie Morrison, who was already under contract to Roach. The other Our Gang recruits included Roach photographer Gene Kornman's daughter Mary Kornman, their friends' son Mickey Daniels, and family friends Allen Hoskins, Jack Davis, Jackie Condon, and Joe Cobb. Most early shorts were filmed outdoors and on location and featured a menagerie of animal characters, such as Dinah the Mule.

Roach's distributor Path released One Terrible Day, the fourth short produced for the series, as the first Our Gang short on September 10, 1922; the pilot Our Gang was not released until November 5. The Our Gang series was a success from the start, with the children's 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 children were pictured on numerous product endorsements.

After Ernie, Mickey and Mary left the series in the mid-1920s, the Our Gang series entered a transitional period. The stress of directing child actors forced Robert McGowan to take doctor-mandated sabbaticals for exhaustion,[26] leaving his nephew Robert A. McGowan (credited as Anthony Mack) to direct many shorts in this period. The Mack-directed shorts are considered among the lesser entries in the series.[27] New faces included Bobby Hutchins as Wheezer, Harry Spear, Jean Darling and Mary Ann Jackson, while stalwart Farina served as the series' anchor.

3a8082e126