Our Gang MGM films

[john16]

I received my copy of The Our Gang Collection,a 5 disc set of the entire MGM series from 1938 till 1944,from Amazon.com just before the new year.

I'm now onto the fourth disc(I watch three or four films at a time),and I'm enjoying them.

They bring back childhood memories for me.Back in the 1970s,these films were shown just as often as the original Hal Roach films on TV.

Here are the ones I remember seeing.

The Little Ranger

Party Fever

Men In Fright

Football Romeo

Alfalfa's Aunt

Tiny Troubles

Clown Princes

Joy Scouts

Auto Antics

Dad For A Day

The New Pupil

Bubbling Troubles

Kiddie Kure

1 2 3 Go

Don't Lie

Mighty Lak A Goat

Family Troubles

Calling All Kids

Little Miss Pinkerton

Dancing Romeo

What memories!

I've read a lot of criticisms about these films from Amazon.com customers.One being that there are more grown ups than there were in the original Hal Roach films.(I never noticed that.)Plus a lot of people don't care for the later Buckwheat,Mickey,Froggy and Janet years.

It surprises me that not a word was written about the 1943 short"Little Miss Pinkerton".

The events in that film were perhaps inapropriet for a Little Rascals film.Such as the shooting of the janitor,and the life threatening situation Buckwheat,Mickey and Froggy wound up in with the two gunmen.(Children were tuning into these films when they were popularly shown on TV.Would you let your children see this particular film?)

Any thoughts?

[Hard-boiled Harry]

I've got the same set and what did impress me about it was the quality of the transfers. The images are sharp and the tones are really nice. I'd read about the poor story lines of the MGM shorts before I bought the set and I was expecting the worse. In fact I was pleasantly surprised by some of the earlier shorts. The initial short, The Little Ranger, was inventive and amusing, it was certainly far better than I'd feared. Unfortunately as the MGM series progressed the quality of the story lines and of the acting fell away ever more sharply. Occasionally a half ways decent story would crop up but they generally failed to make the most of them when they did. Alfalfa's Double could have been so much better than it was. It was inventive, had good special effects for its time and the acting was pretty decent too, it had everything going for it except a decent helping of humor, which is pretty essential in a comedy. In the best of the Hal Roach shorts the kids were basically just having fun and it was being filmed. In the later MGM shorts the kids are clearly acting, and badly at that, and their badly delivered stilted dialogue is straight from a script. I can understand that MGM might want to keep the kids well past their sell by dates, because they were well recognized names and they had pulling power, but when you consider how Hal Roach ditched many of the previous Our Gangers when they reached age seven or eight the teenage Alfalfa, Spanky and Butch were simply too old to be convincingly playing kid's games. All those consideration aside the BIGGEST problem with the later MGM shorts is that they forgot that Our Gang was intended to be a comedy series. The admittedly sometimes hit and miss humor of the earlier Hal Roach shorts was completely set aside in favor of MGM's three favorite story lines, which they repeated over and over again and sometimes combined, especially the first two...
1) Lets put on a show
2) Let's back the war effort
3) Let's make an instructional short to educate our audience
The original Hal Roach Rascals were a hit because their audience identified with them. They were ordinary scruffy and penniless kids who entertained themselves with ingenious dog powered cars, mule powered taxicabs and goose powered boats etc. They created slapstick mayhem when they trashed posh hotels and the mansions of the wealthy, which I'm sure the working class kids in their audience enjoyed immensely. By the time the MGM series finally did the world a favor and bit the dust the Our Gang kids were living in a prosperous leafy suburb where they had access to theaters and paddle steamers. They were accompanied on stage by professional orchestras and by battalions of tap dancing Shirley Temple wannabes. Under MGM Our Gang had lost all touch with reality and with their audience too. Kids went to the cinema to be entertained and amused, MGM forgot that and bored the pants off their audience with metal collecting drives and crossing the road safely campaigns. How would you feel if you'd just spent your 10 cents pocket money hoping to be entertained and instead were treated to a ten minute instructional movie about why it is wrong to tell lies or why you should do your homework? I'm sure those shorts went down like lead balloons and deservedly so. I'll bet their fan base dwindled and their audience left in droves. Oh and let's not forget MGM's greatest and most unforgivable sin against the cinema going public... Janet Burston. Speaking of Janet, if you look at some of the other threads I'm sure you'll find some less than complimentary comments about "Little Miss Pinkerton."

[myhomeo]

In a way, the opening bit for FIGHTIN' FOOLS neatly illustrates MGM's indifferent approach to the Gang.

Consider: We open with Ye Olde 'Clothes Stolen While Swimming' routine, certainly one of the hoariest clichés out there even then. However, if I remember right, the boys are clearly shown wearing bathing suits. Granted, it's not like they could've shown the Gang nude --And that God for that; Spanky's rump may have been cute in 'For Pete's Sake' but not in the MGM era-- but didn't anyone realize or care that screwed up the entire joke? There's nothing embarrassing about having to walk home in a bathing suit. (If I remember right, when Roach pulled out this chestnut, he'd put the kids in underwear. It's not a big improvement, but at least it doesn't negate the entire point of the joke.)

Then we see the boys walking back to town and each of them has donned a different cliché improvised outfit: Spanky's got one of those palm-frond skirts (Presumably borrowed from Creighton Hale), Mickey's wearing a barrel, and Froggy has a grain sack. It's a bit post-modernist for the Gang but at least it indicates they're aware of the cliché. Except there are SIX boys. Buckwheat, Leonard, and Tubby are just in their suits. Apparently, they just came up with the first three, got stuck, and said the Hell with it.