These kids were the pint sized comedy Mafioso of the silver screen, with names so colorful John Gotti would turn over in his grave just to be called The Teflon Spanky!! In mob parlance, the Little Rascals, or Our Gang, were made guys, connected, pipsqueak wiseguy angels with dirty faces who took an oath of laughter, not omerta. They ruled the comedy realm of the silver screen as easily as the Gambino Family ran New Yorks rackets until Gotti got greedy. The Little Rascals were more then pint sized comics...they were the Our Gang Gangbangers of Hollywood. The Murder Inc. of laughter and goddamn it.....they rocked!
I can still hear the recurring theme music droning on forever like that interminable last piano note in "Day In The Life" on the SGT Pepper Album. This theme music ran throughout the comedy shorts...the same song over and over, and some of the slowest reaction time for dialogue response since Helen Keller tried reading a cheese grader. One kid would say..."Hey, Spanky...." the music would come up...Spanky would look at the camera..the music would continue..and five minutes later or so it seemed, longer if you smoked a joint to watch these...(Take a brownie break you have plenty of time before any response in an Our Gang unscripted script) Spanky would eventually respond with "What?" They don't write scripts like that anymore...move over Arthur Miller....these scripts are maximum minimalist...or what I call the Minimialist Max Factor.
We all had our favorite Rascal even though the cast changed more often than a senior citizens diaper...Spanky, Buckwheat, Alfalfa, Stymie, Jackie, Farina, Wheezer, and Butch! No, butch was not a bitch or a bulldyke, and no, Buckwheat did not grow up to become Don King contrary to popular myth and mythology. While the kid "menfolk" held most of the juicy roles, there was also the juicy Darla who had Alfalfa and Spanky salivating and wet dreaming as though Hoover damn had busted wide open. It was her short skirts that had the gang throbbing with a subtle communal sexuality and creating a monstrous Little Rascal big time Alfalfa hardon before he elected before the erection to join the he-man woman haters club. But..in the end...what Darla wants...Darla gets...whether it's in her end or elsewhere. She was the only notable female Our Ganger and quite in charge of her all male harem. She could have any kid in the house! (She also became the singing voice for Chicken of the Sea commercials..."Ask any tuna you happen to see...")
In an age of racial hatred, hangings in the deep south, segregation and all the other American hypocracies of freedom and democracy that did not apply if you were black, Hispanic, female, Asian, Italian, and the beat goes on like the long list of give us your tired, your poor crap..the Our Gang series broke through the racial barriers of the times like a bulldozer, while at the same time introducing ground breaking cinematic portrayals of (Gasp!!!) blacks and whites as comic equals. Before Bojangles held hands and danced up the steps of dat ol' plantation with Shirley Temple, there was a ray of sunshine....Sunshine Sammy Morrison (later of Dead End Kids fame) was riding the Hollywood rocket to stardom as the first African-American superstar and the first to be signed to a long term contract in Hollywood. Along with Morrison, there was Allen "Farina" Hoskins, Matthew "Stymie" Beard and Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas. These did not, no surprise, play well in the south at the time. Remember this was the old south...they could only accept Stepin Fetchit or Bojangles...not Sidney Poitier or Wesley Snipes.
Political correctness began rearing it's ugly head in the Sixties and as usual couldn't relate to the times these films were made and as usual, minus any real insight into reality. I am not politically correct nor ever will be...I am a goddamned Dago and proud of it. As adults. Morrison, Beard and Thomas maintained that the first fully integrated film cast in history was far from racist and that producer Hal Roach was colorblind when it came to race. In fact Sammy was the first African American movie star millionaire. (Sammy was also the highest paid of the Rascals if that's racism...then rub my head for luck and call me "boy") Most Rascals were paid anywhere from $40 - $200 per week for their onscreen gangbanging.
As for the racism, Morrison also explained that there was stereotyping of everybody to a certain degree, but not malicious or overt...the pretty blond girl, the fat kid, the bully, etc and in fact in addition of African Americans..Roach also employed Asian Americans and Italian Americans...yes we dagos and wops were minorities once as well..so were Jews and the Irish..hell weren't we all...Roach in fact opened doors for these minorities and in the process they all made money and for the most part..careers in a very exclusive club. So shove your Political Correctness of your ass. Christ, if it wasn't for organized crime we wops would not have gotten our big break!
How did the Our Gang Gangsters become the kiddie mafia of the cinema? 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 child had taken 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.Our Gang also had its roots in an aborted Roach short-subject series revolving around the adventures of a black boy character called "Sunshine Sammy", played by Ernie Morrison.Theater owners of the time were wary of booking a series focused on a young black boy, and the series ended after only one entry, The Pickaninny, was produced. Morrison or "Sunshine Sammy" instead became one of the faces of the new Our Gang series.
Finding and replacing the cast as the children grew too old to be in the series, they were replaced by new children, usually from the Los Angeles area. Eventually Our Gang talent scouting employed large-scale national contests, where thousands of children tried out for one open role. Norman "Chubby" Chaney (who replaced Joe Cobb), Matthew "Stymie" Beard (who replaced Allen "Farina" Hoskins) and Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas (who replaced Stymie) all won contests to become members of the gang.Even when there was not a talent search, the studio was bombarded by requests from parents who were certain their children were perfect for the series. Among these were future child stars Mickey Rooney and Shirley Temple, neither of whom made it past the audition stage. Not all was lost of course...Shirley Temple went on to become one of the biggest franchises in Hollywood and Mickey Rooney found love as Andy Hardy.
Roach and company rolled up their sleeves having finally found the founding cast members...and work began on the first two-reel shorts in what was referred to as a "kids-and-pets" series, called Hal Roach's Rascals. When it debuted in Hollywood...it boffo SRO according to Variety magazine...the kids had stormed the Normandy Beach and had established a beachhead for the final push and march on Toyland!!! The name changed to Our Gang Comedies and also on ocassion the Little Rascals.
The first Our Gang/Little Rascals silent movie was filmed in 1922, all on location in downtown LA and featured along with it's human cast compliment...Dinah the Mule...it was off to the race track and by the time the decade's odometer was to roll over to 1930 the Rascals were now featured on merchandising for a variety of products...in the world of marketing..they had made their bones!
Petey the Pitbull was actually named Pansy, and became a regular member of the cast in 1927 known as Pete the Pup who never attained the pet pedestal position of Rin Tin Tin or Lassie...but he was an original and the first canine cinema superstar and official watchdog of the Our Gang Comedies. Talkies took over Hollywood and the movie going public like a forest fire raging in Colorado. In 1929 because Roach Studio's hadn't quite mastered syncronized recording to film transfer, sent along a phono disc with the film to theaters...it had the dialogue, sound effects and music recorded so it had to be coordinated with the film to precision or else it would have the appearance of later delayed dialogue Godzilla films...It's amazing how the Japanese with all there tech expertise couldn't get Raymond Burr to talk on cue!!!
Cast changes now included the addition of Jackie Cooper who was featured in a three of the series that focused on his ongoing crush on the school teacher...Mrs. Crabtree. It seems Jackie wanted to to more than just clap her erasers after school. It was also the era where the official Our Gang theme music was injected..inserted...lobotomized! It was callled Good Old Days and it was used eventually in other Roach vehicles for Laurel and Hardy as well.
Cooper left in 1931 with a better offer from MGM..the big time and once again the gang needed some fresh blood...it came in the form of a precocious three year old named George "Spanky" McFarland. Spanky was a Rascal for the next 11 years and we watched him grow from a laughing three year old to a rather rotund kid who looked more like a hot air balloon ready to explode like a super nova. In an interview I recall seeing with Spanky in the 70's, he mentioned that he was offered stock options in RCA television..he declined saying..television would never fly or replace movies. By the way, the interview was on television on an outdoor fishing program I used to watch with celebrity bass fishermen.
The Dawning of the Age of ALFALFA!!! In the year of our lord rascal 1935, there appeared on the horizon a holy man....a prophet...a wizard from the west..his name...Carl Switzer! Carl was in the studio commisary...he was the kid of one of the studio employees...he stared imitating singers and had no voice whatsoever to speak off..he was not a crooner..but a groaner..or at least made the audience groan with his rendtions.His nickname and no one knows why was Alfalfa...Roach was eating lunch at the time and saw the strange performance right out of Cuckoo's Nest and and made plans to add him to the Rascals lineup as Spanky's sidekick.
One other addition of interest, was one for the transvestite history books...Stymie's sister was Buckwheat..who was played by Bille Thomas..a guy!! When Stymie left the cast Buckwheat apparently had made a side trip to Sweden and came back as Buckwheat...the dude! Darla and Porky aslso joined the cast and created the lineup that was the most popular and the one we recognize today as the holy grail of Our Gang comedy casts...
1934 did not bode well for comedy shorts...movie theaters were switching now to double features and dropping shorts like Laurel and Hardy and the Little Rascals. Laurel and Hardy switched to longer features to stay afloat but Our Gang remained in the technical and creative past..except for one...General Spanky set in the Shirley Temple Civil War minus the pouting face and tap dance steps. The iceberg that turned it into a Titanic was the fact that they had adults in it in lead roles...it bombed and sank like an ocean liner in a storm.
The series lumbered along like an amputee until 1938 and by now Alfalfa had surpassed Spanky as the lead character, so for whatever reason, Spanky retired from the series. Porky left as well and was replaced by a youngster named Mickey Gubitosi..who later changed his name to Robert Blake. Maybe it was Blake who shot Alfalfa over a gambling debt years later...maybe Blake was on the Grassy Knoll...we'll never know about the knoll..only Phil Spector has that information. By 1941 and the start of WWII...Darla had left and all the regulars had now been replaced...Buckwheat however remained in the gang until the series ended...the last of the originals....Buckwheat Lives!!!
The legacy of the Rascals lives on and has taken it's own position in the pop culture universe. The group Spanky and Our Gang in the Sixties named themselves in honor of the rascals acccording to the group. The myth of Don King as Buckwheat persists to this day and is as much of a mystery as the Paul is Dead rumor years ago. Eddie Murphy took the Buckwheat character and in try SNL style..made him immortal to a new generation of college fans. There were comic strips and comic books...in fact some of the early Our Gang comics were written and drawn by Walt Kelly who did one of my all time favorite comic strips...Pogo!! Damn I loved that little swamp critter. The Little Racals movie in the 90's kept the flame alive, sort of, kind of, but there will always only be one Spanky...one Alfalfa...one Pete the Pup...and hot damn...one Darla the Sexy Gangbanger who penetrated the walls of the He-Man Women Haters Club with attitude and short skirts that made Alfalfa's anatomy stand at attention and become the Little Rascals version of a stalker!! I can hear it now...Darla walks up to Alfalfa and says.."Is that a little rascal in your pants or are you just happy to see me?" No tuna jokes please.... .