Alfalfa Little Rascal

Our Gang , also known as The Little Rascals or Hal Roach's Rascals, was a series of American comedy short films about a group of poor neighborhood children and the adventures they had 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 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. Of course, when sound came in at the end of the 1920s, McGowan was forced to modify 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 used a more streamlined approach to McGowan's methods, in order to meet the demands of the increasingly sophisticated movie industry of the mid to late 1930s. Douglas in particular was forced to streamline his films, as he directed Our Gang after Roach was forced to halve the running times of the shorts from two reels (20 minutes) to one reel (10 minutes).

Finding and replacing the cast

As the children grew too old to be in the series, they were replaced by new kids, usually from the Los Angeles area. Eventually, Our Gang talent scouting was done using large-scale national contests, where thousands of kids (often at the behest of their parents) 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 major contests to become members of the gang. Even when there was not a massive talent search going on, the Roach 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, Judy Garland and Shirley Temple, all of whom never made it past the audition stage.

African-Americans in Our Gang

The Our Gang series is notable for being one of the first times in cinema history that blacks and whites were portrayed as equals, though a number of people, including members of the African-American community, do not look favorably upon the characters of the black children today. 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.

In their adult years, Morrison, Beard and 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 "freckle-faced kid," the "fat kid," the "neighborhood bully", 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" – commonplace in the stylized, slapstick comedy tradition in which the Our Gang films are firmly rooted.

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 had 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 was not 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, Andy Samuel, Johnny Downs, and Jay R. Smith.

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