Original little rascals alfalfa
The sound arrival saw those wonderful big band scores composed by Leroy Shield and Marvin Hatley, with the actual theme song written by Shield. The aspects of poverty and grittiness clicked especially in the 1930s images from these films are often what I think of when I am imagining those times. Talkies and the Depression arrived at about the same time. What has come to be regarded as its most significant aspect by cultural historians is that the Gang functions as a kind of color-and-gender-blind utopia: girls, boys, blacks and whites all playing and interacting equally side by side, the premise being that kids are innocent, oblivious to the bigoted attitudes that will set in as they become adults. The humor was generally gentle and universal, and centered around the kids getting into the kind of trouble Dennis the Menace might relate to. But one in which the little ones are not saccharine little dollies – no, those are the ones the Gang tends to get in scraps with.
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If they are idealized, the inspiration seems to be Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn – a world of back fences and horse barns and lemonade stands. The kids in the gang are poor, unkempt, often barefoot. In the Our Gang comedies, the Roach aesthetic of (relative) realism prevails. Most people don’t know that the franchise was originally created under Charley Chase’s supervision, and the writing stable included such future greats as Frank Capra, Leo McCarey, Frank Tashlin and Walter Lantz, among many others. Their animal companion Pete the Pup was drafted from the competing Buster Brown film series, in which he had played “Tige.” In 1922, Roach had the inspiration to build a whole gang of friends around him, and other kids were recruited for the job: curly haired Mary Kornman, freckle-faced Mickey Daniels, Jack Davis (Harold Lloyd’s brother-in-law), wild-haired Jackie Condon, the grossly corpulent Joe Cobb, and Allen “Farina” Hoskins. That’s him on Lloyd’s shoulders in Number, Please, for example. The kernel of Our Gang began with “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison, an African American child actor who began appearing with Harold Lloyd and Snub Pollard in Hal Roach shorts as a kind of mascot in 1919.
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Those who primarily know the cast from the series’ latter days may like to know about some of the original gang.
Original little rascals alfalfa series#
Measuring from inception to the present day, Our Gang enjoys the distinction of being the longest lasting series of comedy shorts in the history of American cinema.
Original little rascals alfalfa tv#
Most Americans from the Baby Boom Generation through Generation X know these comedy shorts well from their showings on television, though since the ones that were distributed to TV were mainly from the Depression years of the 1930s, they might be surprised to learn the series started in the silent days (1922) and lasted all the way until 1944, 22 years, outlasting the popular Spanky, Alfalfa and Darla. Because I’ve had occasion to mention this franchise many times on this blog and in other writings, and it’s pretty important to film comedy history, I thought it fitting to finally do a special post on the comedy film short series known as “Our Gang” or “The Little Rascals.”