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Post by mtw12055 on Jun 3, 2011 11:59:10 GMT -5
For those of you who remember watching the Rascals on TV regularly, do you recall which films weren't shown? Do you recall certain scenes not being included in certain films?
I didn't catch the films on TV until their brief run on AMC around 2001-2002 (and caught the MGM shorts during their run on Goodlife/American Life around 2005). AMC apparently edited in many of the scenes usually cut from previous television showings of the Rascals. I recall most of the Uncle Tom's Cabin scenes reinstated into "Spanky", as well as the scene where Spanky picks up the Chinese boy from the laundromat in "Washee Ironee".
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Post by OPT on Jun 3, 2011 13:12:59 GMT -5
Little Sinner comes to mind for being hacked to pieces among many others. I saw a lot of the edited scenes on t.v. at a young age...then as I saw them again in the later 70's early 80's I knew when scenes were missing. I even remember seeing Spanky's bare backside on t.v.
I never saw the complete version of Little Sinner until it came out on DVD.
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Post by rhapsody on Jun 3, 2011 13:14:20 GMT -5
I watched them daily as a kid in the early 70's on a Boston UHF station. None of the silents were ever shown (I didn't even know they existed until I saw Maltin's book in the school library several years later and didn't recognize several of the kids on the cover.)
I know for a fact I never saw Big Ears and Little Daddy. And while I was a fan primarily of the early talkie period, I have no childhood memories of Small Talk, Railroadin', Moan and Groan, A Tough Winter, or the Kid From Borneo. I do recall all of the remaining Roach-era shorts, so my guess is that these were left out of the syndication package, a few of them no doubt as a result of censorship. I usually avoided the MGM shorts even then, (I thought they were boring and "stagey",) although they were run along with the Roach shorts. There never seemed to be any method to the order in which the shorts were shown. Alfalfa and Spanky one day, Scotty and little Spanky the next, then Big Spanky in an MGM short. I found that pretty funny.
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Post by ymymeatemup on Jun 3, 2011 22:48:40 GMT -5
Prior to collecting videotapes, I never saw any of the silent episodes, nor any of the following: Small Talk Railroadin' Lazy Days Moan & Groan, Inc. A Tough Winter Little Daddy Big Ears A Lad An' A Lamp When I was really little (4 or 5), "The Kid From Borneo" was my favorite episode. When the series returned to my area (San Francisco) about five years later (around 1973), I waited in vain to watch that episode again, as it was no longer in the rotation.
Also, there were several scenes in certain episodes that I didn't see until collecting the videos (though some of these may have been intact when I was really little). These would include virtually any scene with racial content, or for that matter, any shot that showed a black kid by himself. For instance, in "Teacher's Beau," when Spanky says "Three cheers for Miss Jones," the TV print only had one cheer. I always assumed this was intentionally meant as a gag in the original film, until I later could see that the second and third cheers happen while the camera is on Buckwheat.
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Post by mickeygubitosifan on Jun 3, 2011 23:57:28 GMT -5
Also, there were several scenes in certain episodes that I didn't see until collecting the videos (though some of these may have been intact when I was really little). These would include virtually any scene with racial content, or for that matter, any shot that showed a black kid by himself. For instance, in "Teacher's Beau," when Spanky says "Three cheers for Miss Jones," the TV print only had one cheer. I always assumed this was intentionally meant as a gag in the original film, until I later could see that the second and third cheers happen while the camera is on Buckwheat. I had never heard of that. Do you have any idea why they would have thought it best to edit out parts of the films that showed Buckwheat or the other black Our Gang actors alone in a camera shot?
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Post by rhapsody on Jun 4, 2011 11:46:25 GMT -5
I don't think it was a case of African Americans being hired to do the editing. To the contrary, actually. While I believe Hal Roach probably did more than most realize to help improve race relations in the US by portraying - a full 30 years before Brown v. Board of Education - black and white kids being in same gang, going to the same school and (almost always) being treated with the same respect (or same disrespect) from others, there were unquestionably some scenes that would be seen as racist by later audiences.
I'm as anti-censorship as they come, but the films were shown on TV as a kid's show, and by the late 1960's people of all races were becoming more sensitive about things that no one would have given a second thought about 30 or 40 years earlier. So I can see why some scenes were cut. And I can also see some some junior editor maybe not fully comprehending the task at hand simply hacking out scenes of some of the black children hamming it up a bit. You know, when in doubt, cut it out.
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Post by rhapsody on Jun 4, 2011 12:16:45 GMT -5
I hadn't heard that about Hal Roach and Big Ears. Interesting. With the strangely contemporary divorce angle (My grandmother divorced in the mid 1940's and it was nearly unheard of and considered scandalous even then) and the little kid nearly killing himself with contents of a medicine cabinet, I'm not really sure what they were thinking.
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Post by ymymeatemup on Jun 4, 2011 16:09:40 GMT -5
While I far prefer to see uncut episodes of Our Gang (or anything else), it's not difficult to see the position the TV stations and King World were/are in when it comes to editing content. They've got to not only worry about complaints from irate viewers, but also the possibility of advertisers withdrawing their commercials from the particular timeslots. I think they just decided to err on the side of caution and show the black kids only when necessary. It probably saves them a lot of headaches in the process.
But let's face it, this really comes down to the way our society is, where everything gets scrutinized in order to find any detail that might be offensive - real or imagined - and people are ready to sue over the slightest little thing. Not that there aren't genuinely offensive moments to be found in the Our Gang series, but I'm hard-pressed to see anything wrong with the starch/sugar scene in "The Lucky Corner."
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Post by rhapsody on Jun 4, 2011 17:49:25 GMT -5
But let's face it, this really comes down to the way our society is, where everything gets scrutinized in order to find any detail that might be offensive - real or imagined - and people are ready to sue over the slightest little thing. Not that there aren't genuinely offensive moments to be found in the Our Gang series, but I'm hard-pressed to see anything wrong with the starch/sugar scene in "The Lucky Corner." When discussing much of this editing we are going back about 40 years now. As someone who has been involved with civil litigation for nearly 30 years, I honestly don't think they were worried at that time about being sued over the starch/sugar scene or over Stymie trying to throw eggs at bad guys but somehow only hitting himself again and again. Instead I suspect parent's groups and educators played some role in explaining to them that scenes showing black kids as ridiculously stupid as compared with their white counterparts was not a good thing for kids to watch whilst eating their cornflakes every morning.
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Post by mickeygubitosifan on Jun 5, 2011 0:12:18 GMT -5
I would figure that the cutting of the starched lemonade scene in The Lucky Corner for use on television was probably done in order to eliminate the chance that people might see it as a knock on Buckwheat's intelligence. I didn't see the joke as being about race at all, though. Of course, it wasn't the first time that a Gangster had mistakenly added a questionable ingredient to food. Bobby Hutchins had himself a time with the plaster of paris pancakes in Bouncing Babies. Does anyone know if that scene was ever censored?
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Post by rhapsody on Jun 5, 2011 0:45:20 GMT -5
I don't know for sure, but I'm inclined to doubt that anyone - TV days or before - was concerned enough about kids putting starch in lemonade making pancakes with plaster of paris to delete those scenes. If Buckwheat's lemonade scene was deleted for TV, it was likely due to a sweep of cuts of scenes that were considered demeaning to blacks, some of which clearly were not, others which clearly were.
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Post by axlegrease on Jun 5, 2011 1:14:08 GMT -5
I grew up in Chicago. I never knew that Farina appeared in Pups Is Pups until I read Maltin/Bann, and I never saw his scenes until I watched it on VHS.
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Post by ymymeatemup on Jun 5, 2011 2:03:22 GMT -5
If Buckwheat's lemonade scene was deleted for TV, it was likely due to a sweep of cuts of scenes that were considered demeaning to blacks, some of which clearly were not, others which clearly were. This seems to be the likeliest reason, since it's the only thing that explains the editing of the second and third cheers in "Teacher's Beau," not to mention other examples such as closeups of Buckwheat eating in "Shrimps For A Day" and "Teacher's Beau." And just to clarify - I didn't mean to imply that anybody would sue over the starch scene, but was just elaborating on the theme of "PC overkill" in our society. Under the circumstances, it's not hard to see why TV stations would be paranoid about the content of their programming. It's gotten to the point now where most of them simply refrain from showing the Rascals.
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Post by mtw12055 on Jun 5, 2011 12:04:10 GMT -5
I grew up in Chicago. I never knew that Farina appeared in Pups Is Pups until I read Maltin/Bann, and I never saw his scenes until I watched it on VHS. From what I understand, King World took out all of the scenes with Farina in "When the Wind Blows" as well. And I know several people were confused about why "Little Daddy" was removed from the package. I remember hearing somewhere that it had something to do with the living conditions of Farina and Stymie. And "The First Seven Years", while (to my knowledge) still part of the television package, was not shown by some stations. Could this perhaps be because of the sword fight scenes? I'm not sure when "Small Talk" was officially taken out of the TV package (though it certainly was part of it at one point, as I've seen an Interstate TV print on ebay at least once). My guess is that it had something to do with being a longer short. Also, King World may have possibly felt it wouldn't have been well received by certain people. To be more specific, let's say you were somebody who had never seen an Our Gang short before. And let's say that when you finally got the chance to watch one, it wound up being "Small Talk". Being the first Our Gang talkie, today this short can seem very slow moving, and people not familiar with Our Gang may lose interest.
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Post by ymymeatemup on Jun 5, 2011 14:05:10 GMT -5
And "The First Seven Years", while (to my knowledge) still part of the television package, was not shown by some stations. Could this perhaps be because of the sword fight scenes? I'm sure this is the reason, as it fits in the same category with the medicine cabinet in "Big Ears" - that is, things you don't want children at home imitating. That's why they stopped showing "Underdog" on TV, since he got his super powers by swallowing a pill. I can remember seeing "The First Seven Years" when I was young, but I don't think TBS was showing it in the '80s.
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