The Little Rascals: The Life And Times Of Our Gang – Leonard Maltin & Richard W. Bann, 1992 ★★★★★

The Gang's All Here

Childhood is over too quickly, even when it lasts 22 years. That’s how you feel reading the last pages of this extensive overview of one of Hollywood’s most enduring creations. 

Popular movie critic Leonard Maltin and co-author Richard W. Bann tell how a gang of lovable kids survived everything from talking pictures to puberty to unite generations, both older and yet-unborn, in laughter.

In a series of comedies bookended by the Jazz Age and World War II, a scrappy set of class-challenged youngsters matched wits with dog catchers, truant officers, and snooty society matrons. Over time, the kids’ names and faces changed, but the formula remained constant, as did the program’s appeal. About the only thing it lacked was a clear name. Since the first short produced in the series was called “Our Gang,” the series was known by that much of the time, but it was also billed as Hal Roach’s Rascals and The Little Rascals. It is by this later moniker that the series is best known as that was how it was later marketed for syndicated television.

Some of this titular confusion lapped into the book itself. When first published in hardcover in 1977, it went by Our Gang. But when it was re-released and substantially revised, the publisher changed the name to what television viewers would know.

“Our Gang has a nice ring, the two words strike each other engagingly,” the book begins. “Apart they don’t mean much, but together they stand for all the best of the collective American boyhood…As timeless as childhood itself, Our Gang represents the kind of adventures kids yearn for, and the ones grown-ups wish they could have had.”

The series has infiltrated our culture like osmosis. Even if you’ve never seen one of the 221 Our Gang shorts, you probably recognize its characters' names: Spanky, Alfalfa, Buckwheat, Darla, Stymie, Wheezer, and Pete the Pup. There are other show memes, too: Miss Crabtree, the He-Man Woman-Haters Club, the International Silver String Submarine Band, Waldo, Butch and the Woim. Sure, “Seinfeld” has the Soup Nazi and Festivus, but what are the odds people will still talk about them in 60 years?

The great thing about Maltin-Bann, as I have come to know this book, is how it sorts through the details to provide a chronological sense of Our Gang’s development.

When I first read the book in 1980, I was well aware of the talking shorts of the 1930s, then airing daily in the New York City area. What I didn’t know about were the seven years of silent shorts that preceded them, not until I read this book. It was as silent comedy that Our Gang first won lasting fame, and Maltin and Bann give this period much attention.

Hal Roach told the authors that he got the idea for the series when, bored by studio business, he found himself staring out his window at a neighboring lumberyard watching kids argue over the sticks they had collected.

“All of a sudden I realized I’d been watching this silly argument over the sticks for fifteen minutes,” Roach explained. “They’re just kids being kids. So I thought if I could find some clever street kids to just play themselves in films and show life from a kid’s angle, maybe I could make a dozen of these things before I wear out the idea.”

The silent Our Gangs were a unique animal in the series, and not just because you had to follow the action with title cards. The stories were looser than they’d later become, with much side business including bits featuring animals only tangentially connected to the kids. The first star was Ernie “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison, a ten-year-old genial smoothie and Roach veteran who in the original “Our Gang” short played the ringleader of a gang trying to separate a rich kid from his clothes. Sammy’s not a bad kid; he just needs something to wear other than a barrel. Maltin-Bann reports the film lost but for a brief, unreviewable “fragment;” in fact more than half of the short not only survives but is viewable by you right now onYouTube.

Over time, Mickey Daniels, Mary Kornman, Jackie Condon, Joe Cobb, and Allen “Farina” Hoskins joined Sunshine Sammy as the main faces of silent Our Gang. I was always especially fascinated by Condon reading Maltin-Bann; his hair looked a lot like my own back then as I never bothered to comb it. Cobb and Farina would last long enough to appear in early talkies. They were uniquely expressive actors on screen, able to register joy as they made merry with their many cool inventions, such as dog-powered fire engines and fishing-line baby monitor systems, which were the hallmark of Roach Studios gagman Charley Oelze.

Sentiment was a hallmark of the silent comedies, often of a twisted variety. “Good Cheer,” released in 1926, presented the Gang “as street urchins who live alone and can’t afford a real Christmas,” Maltin and Bann relate. They go on to describe a conversation between Mickey and a one-legged street kid who complains his foot is cold. “You gotta lot to be thankful for,” Mickey replies. “You only got one foot – I got two.”

Our Gang as they were in their early (1925) prime, around a fire engine that for once they didn't build themselves. Allen "Farina" Hoskins is in the driver's seat, above him going clockwise are Mickey Daniels, Mary Kornman, Jackie Condon, and Joe Cobb. According to Maltin-Bann, this was a Christmas publicity photo taken by the Roach Studios' house photographer, who also happened to be Mary's dad. [Image from scaredsillybypaulcastiglia.blogspot.com.]

This wasn’t standard for Our Gang shorts; generally the comedy kept pretty light. If the silent shorts occasionally went off into strange territory, say the proto-Viagra gimmick that fuels the ultra-weird “Wiggle Your Ears,” they also provided dependable backstops for future Our Gang endeavors.

1923’s “Stage Fright,” showcasing the Gang putting on a play set in ancient Rome, would be remade as the talkie “Shivering Shakespeare,” among other putting-on-a-show plotlines. 1927’s “Love My Dog” involves Farina trying to save his dog from being put down, and became “The Pooch” five years later. 1924’s “Tire Trouble,” with the Gang running their own taxi service, became the first of many soapbox-racer-themed shorts.

For me, the run of silent Our Gang shorts present this book’s most fascinating takeaway; Maltin and Bann describe them in such loving detail. By the time sound arrived, the series was highly successful, so much so Roach gave it more of his attention than his biggest moneymaker, Harold Lloyd. Lloyd left Roach Studios complaining about this even though his little brother-in-law Jack Davis had played one of Our Gang’s first tough guys.

Sound caught the Our Gang train short, however. As Maltin and Bann explain, “the early sound Our Gang films…struggled through a transition period in which they were slow and unsure of themselves.” Slow pacing and an overreliance on funny noises, they add, make the shorts harder to watch now than their silent predecessors.

By the time the series reached its 100^th short, “Pups Is Pups,” which has the Gang infiltrating a high-society pet show, those kinks had been resolved. “Pups Is Pups,” with what Maltin-Bann call its “irresistible spontaneity and innocence,” showcase two of the Gang’s most-beloved characters, Jackie Cooper (who had the most successful post-series run of any Our Gang child actor) and Bobby “Wheezer” Hutchins, whose squint-eyed cuteness was off the charts. The next short, “Teacher’s Pet,” was even better, introducing Miss Crabtree, the pretty schoolteacher with the scary name who would be the subject of a trio of quality Our Gang shorts involving a lovestruck Jackie and some of the best one-liners in the entire series.

Jackie eventually left Our Gang, yet the series only got better. By the middle 1930s, it had hit its prime, with Spanky, Alfalfa, Buckwheat, Porky, and Darla the story centers. In 1936, the series slimmed down from two reels (around 20 minutes) to single-reel comedies of about ten minutes. This led to some weaker stories, as Maltin and Bann point out, but also in time a sharper focus that would translate better to TV.

The last shining moment in the run of the show may have been “Our Gang Follies Of 1938,” the last Our Gang two-reeler. Alfalfa’s fantasy about leaving the gang behind to become an opera star devolve into a “Scrooge”-like dream sequence featuring outlandish musical numbers and Alfalfa’s hilariously dead-eyed performance of “I’m The Barber Of Seville,” which he sings under duress after signing a bad contract.

Speaking of bad contracts, the one Hal Roach signed giving away Our Gang to M-G-M was a dousy. As he told Maltin and Bann, it was a case of making the best of a diminishing market, but it was something both Roach and series fans would bitterly regret. The final 52 Our Gang shorts, produced by M-G-M, started okay but became preachy, war-propaganda fests marred by overacting from newer Rascals, among them a kid named Mickey Gubitosi who later became Robert Blake.

In addition to laying out the show’s history, Maltin and Bann take on some of the popular notions that have developed around Our Gang. Like why did so many of the Gang members have such wretched adulthoods? And did the show foster a kind of racial injustice in its depictions of black cast members?

Given that Maltin-Bann are writing a celebration, not an exposé, it makes sense they accentuate the positive here. I found the first question more problematic. While it may be true, as Maltin and Bann point out, that many of the cast, like Spanky, Darla, Jackie Cooper, Jackie Condon, and Joe Cobb, lived productive and happy lives, others suffered from chronic substance abuse and lawbreaking. Perhaps the most sinister omission in Maltin-Bann is the case of Gus Meins, one of the series’ best directors who committed suicide after being indicted on charges of child molestation. All Roach would say about the guy to Maltin and Bann, and all they relate in turn, is that Meins did good work. It’s painful to think of the damage Meins, if he was indeed a sex abuser, could have inflicted on such a target-rich environment as Our Gang.

Maltin and Bann spend more time probing the racial question with Our Gang. They readily admit the show sometimes went for some gasp-inducing humor, but present most of the race jokes as a product of their time. It’s ironic that Our Gang, if produced in a more segregated fashion, would have made for less objectionable humor by today’s standards, by letting the white boys and girls endure all the pratfalls and pranks. As it was, you had blacks and whites together in each of the 221 shorts. A black actor starred in the very first short (Sunshine Sammy in “Our Gang”) and the very last (Billie “Buckwheat” Thomas in “Tale Of A Dog.”) It’s a record more commendable than blameworthy, however political incorrect the comedy got. As Maltin-Bann point out, Farina was integrating the Gang’s baseball team on screen while Jackie Robinson was still, like him, in grade school.

There is a wonderfully immersive quality to reading this book. You don’t want to put it down; at least I didn’t. There are nice sections about various aspects of the show including its financial performance, the fates of the many players, and even the studio cafeteria which was open to the public (and which was where Alfalfa got his big break performing off the street with his brother). Maltin and Bann talked to nearly everyone involved in the show who was alive after the early 1970s; you get a warm feeling for them all after a while that only enhances the pleasure of watching the original shorts.

The Little Rascals is everything one wants from a viewing companion.