Our Gang on the Radio (1938)

[mtw12055]

Here is the Our Gang group in a 1938 episode of the radio series Thirty Minutes in Hollywood, starring George Jessel and his then-wife Norma Talmadge.

Imagine if the kids realized that their answers to Miss Crabtree’s quiz in “School’s Out” were jokes… and still ran with them. Much of the Our Gang material is in the first half, with Spanky getting most of the lines.

Also featured are ex-Rascal Johnny Downs (promoting a movie that seems to have been either retitled before release or never finished), songwriter Gus Edwards, Tommy Tucker & His Orchestra, featuring Amy Arnell, and wonder child Josephine Starr. Josephine was a seven-year-old Filipino girl with the voice of a veteran opera singer. She was apparently a discovery of Jessel’s, who frequently had her on his show. Otherwise, I could find no information on her.

According to a Broadcast Magazine blurb from around this time, Hal Roach hoped to launch his Our Gang stars into a radio series of their own. Perhaps this appearance was a test to see how well they could do. The radio series never materialized for reasons that aren’t clear. Maybe Roach’s sell of the series to MGM a few months later put things on hold. Or perhaps nobody else saw the potential in an Our Gang radio show. As evidenced by this appearance, the tighter scripting and more joke-driven humor of radio comedies didn’t quite match the Our Gang world. But it’s still a fascinating listen, if an unusual one.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=phqq2BCfpUk&fbclid=IwAR3kGuUnk2c97kTUgdzoZ3fuGcY-Yor4v-_hWU0MJbb-Vk04BqNeK1yn4jI

[imnotallenhoskins]

No wonder there was no Our Gang radio show, that was pretty dire.

[myhomeo]

Yeah, pretty weak, I'm afraid. 'Schoolroom' acts were a standard Vaudeville comedy routine done mainly by beginning performers --The Marx Brothers started off with one-- so that's perhaps why they went in that direction. They apparently just parceled out a bunch of the jokes from those old routines and gave the lion's share to Spanky because he was the biggest star at the time.

While I'm almost certain Spanky didn't get the double-entendre with the 'What animal keeps your mother in furs?' joke, I'm wondering if anyone else did either.

But yeah, it's rather hard to imagine the Gang working as a radio show. I can imagine maybe something like the Muppets with the suggestion the Gang were somehow staging and broadcasting the show entirely on their own like with their 'Follies' shorts, but it's unlikely that would have occurred to anyone back then.

[mtw12055]

Yes, quite a bit of groan-worthy material. Plus, Buckwheat and Porky still have their speech impediments, so I doubt that would have made regular broadcasts any easier. Porky also seems unsure about his line.

By the way, Spanky's line about getting "four bells from Jimmie Fidler" was a reference to Fidler's four-bell rating system for films (four being the best). Fidler also narrated Movietone News' "The Hollywood Spotline" newsreels, one of which covered Our Gang. Boy, Spanky really had it in for Johnny Downs, huh?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nMdhK-gjzA