darla hood singing im in the mood for love from Our Gang

[shirleymurphy]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QWPi8MtaQk



Here's Darla Hood singing “I’m In The Mood For Love” from Little Rascals.



TV Tropes has mentioned that a lot of modern viewers are turned off by the way they made Darla Hood all wiggling and sensual-to-the-point-of-seductive in a lot of the Little Rascals musical numbers and i see their point in today's post-JonBenet world.



I was surprised to see the poor little boy in black face in this clip. I say "poor little boy" because i don't blame *him* for the black face, he had to do what the adults in control of him told him to do and the fact that none of them saw any problem with black face on a little boy who had no say in the matter - he might even have been supporting his family with his Little Rascals income given it was the Depression.

[RJH]

The "poor little boy" in blackface is Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer. This clip is from "The Pinch Singer" released in 1936.

[shirleymurphy]

Thanks.. looking at IMDB, they mention that the black face sequences are often cut from TV repeats.

Yeah, all that sensual wiggling made me feel uncomfortable viewing it.

[buckwheatisawesome]

If I can add my two cents to this, if you watch the movie The Pinch Singer, you would find the " poor little boy" is definitely Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer, wanting to be able to sing so trying different disguises, including this blackface disguise. I don't understand what people mean by saying Our Gang is racist, because black people are "dumb" in the Our Gang movies. Many white people are "dumb" too, in the movies! Clearly, people did not realize that, especially King's World!!

[Buppster]

I think that things should be judged within the context of their own time. Today's society might find 'black face' distasteful but back at the time when the Our Gang movies were made nobody though anything about it, it was simply a form of entertainment. Al Jolson made a career out of blacking up, as did a whole load of different men who appeared in The Black & White Minstrel Shows over the decades that it was in existence. I really dislike revisionism and any attempts to push today's values onto time periods in which they had no meaning and simply didn't exist. The revisionist insistence on misplaced sexual equality that insists on including female characters, who amount to female ninja warriors, in totally anachronistic time periods will no doubt be viewed with derision in times to come. As for the periods in which the Our Gang movies were made people were different back then, their values were different, their ways of life were completely different from our own and society was also very different, it's that simple and people should simply accept that and not try to insert today's moral values where they don't belong.

[shirleymurphy]

yeah. Sadly a lot of modern girls only find out when they reach adulthood that they can wear all the dresses and jewelry and perfume they want and still have all the adventures.

[Buppster]

I'm all in favour of equality but equals can be different and many modern day social justice warriors seem to miss that point entirely, insisting instead that that woman are the same as men, when blatantly obviously they're not.

[shirleymurphy]

Yeah. Trousers, by definition, can't be "just as feminine", as they are shared with boys and men. I don't know where feminists got that from.