Our Gang
Our Gang is an American series of comedy short films chronicling the adventures of a group of children in a working class neighborhood of Los Angeles. Created by film producer Hal Roach, who also produced the Laurel and Hardy films, Our Gang shorts were produced from 1922 to 1944, spanning the silent film and early sound film periods of American cinema. Our Gang is noted for showing children behaving in a relatively natural way; Roach and original director Robert F. McGowan worked to film the unaffected, raw nuances apparent in regular children, rather than have them imitate adult acting styles. The series also broke new ground by portraying black and white children interacting as equals during the Jim Crow era of racial segregation in the United States.
The franchise began in 1922 as a silent short subject series produced by the Roach studio and released by Pathé Exchange. Roach changed distributors from Pathé to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1927, and the series entered its most popular period after converting to sound in 1929. Production continued at Roach until 1938, when the Our Gang production unit was sold to MGM, where production continued until 1944. Across 220 short films and a feature-film spin-off, General Spanky, the Our Gang series featured more than 41 child actors as regular members of its cast.
Because MGM retained the rights to the Our Gang trademark after buying the series, the Roach-produced Our Gang sound films were re-released to theaters and syndicated for television under the title The Little Rascals.
The Roach-produced Little Rascals shorts that remain under copyright are formerly owned by Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment which manages the copyrights as well as theatrical and home video and streaming releases until its closure in 2024. Since 2024, Legend Films currently co-owns the rights of the 1931-1938 with Multicom Entertainment Group, using restored titles from their Official Films masters as "Hal Roach's Famous Kids Comedies"; the entries produced between 1922 and 1930, inclusive, are in the public domain in the United States. Paramount Global owns the television distribution rights to the 1931–1938 Roach-era shorts for broadcast and cable. Meanwhile, MGM's Our Gang series is currently owned by Warner Bros. through Turner Entertainment Co.
New productions based on the shorts have been made over the years, including the 1994 feature film The Little Rascals, released by Universal Pictures.
Series overview
Unlike many films featuring children and based in fantasy, producer/creator Hal Roach rooted Our Gang in real life: most of the children were poor, and the gang was often at odds with snobbish or rich children, officious adults, parents, and other such adversaries.Directorial approach
directed most of the Our Gang shorts until 1933, assisted by his nephew Anthony Mack. McGowan worked to develop a style that allowed the children to be as natural as possible, downplaying the importance of the filmmaking equipment. Scripts were written by the Hal Roach comedy-writing staff, which included at various times Leo McCarey, Frank Capra, Walter Lantz, and Frank Tashlin. The children, some too young to read, rarely saw the scripts; instead, McGowan would explain scenes to each child immediately before they were shot, directing the children using a megaphone and encouraging improvisation.With the introduction of sound films in the late 1920s, McGowan slightly modified his approach, but scripts were not closely followed until he left the series. Later Our Gang directors, such as Gus Meins and Gordon Douglas, streamlined the approach to McGowan's methods to meet the demands of the increasingly sophisticated film industry of the mid-to-late 1930s. Douglas was forced to streamline his approach after Roach halved the running times of the shorts from two reels to one reel.
Finding and replacing the cast
As children aged out of their roles, they were replaced by new children, usually from the Los Angeles area. Eventually Our Gang talent scouting employed large-scale national contests in which thousands of children auditioned for open roles. Norman Chaney, Matthew Beard, and Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas all won contests to become members of the cast: Chaney replaced Joe Cobb, Beard replaced Allen Hoskins, and Thomas replaced Beard.The studio was continuously bombarded by requests from parents suggesting their children for roles in the films. These children included future child stars Mickey Rooney and Shirley Temple, neither of whom advanced past the audition stage.
African-American and other minority cast members
The Our Gang series, produced during the Jim Crow era, is one of the first in cinema history in which African Americans and White Americans were portrayed as equals. The five black child actors who held main roles in the series were Ernie Morrison, Eugene Jackson, Allen Hoskins, Matthew Beard and Billie Thomas. Morrison was the first black actor signed to a long-term contract in Hollywood history and the first major black star in Hollywood history.The African-American characters have often been criticized as racial stereotypes. The black children spoke in a stereotypical "Negro dialect", and several controversial gags revolved directly around their skin color, such as Stymie sweating jet-black ink and Buckwheat contracting fake "white measles" and supposedly transforming into a monkey. In the 1924 short Lodge Night, the kids form a parody club based on the Ku Klux Klan.
In their adult years, actors Morrison, Beard, and Thomas defended the series, arguing that the white characters were similarly stereotyped: the "freckle-faced kid", the "fat kid", the "neighborhood bully", the "pretty blond girl", and the "mischievous toddler". In an interview on Tom Snyder's The Tomorrow Show in 1974, Beard said of his time in the series that "I feel it was great. Some of the lines I had to say I didn't like, but I never look at it like that. I just try to look at it as mostly a fun thing. We were just a group of kids who were having fun." In a separate interview, Morrison stated, "When it came to race, Hal Roach was color-blind."
Our Gang
History
1922–1925: early years
According to Roach, he devised the idea for Our Gang in 1921 after auditioning a child actress whom he believed to be overly rehearsed and wearing excessive makeup. Through his window, Roach saw some children arguing over sticks of wood in a lumberyard and thought that a series of film shorts about children being themselves might be a success.Our Gang also had its roots in a canceled Roach short-subject series revolving around the adventures of a black boy called "Sunshine Sammy", played by Ernie Morrison. As some theater owners had been wary of booking shorts focused on a black boy, the series ended after just one entry, The Pickaninny, was produced. The character became a focus of the new Our Gang series.
Under the supervision of Charley Chase, work began on the first two-reel shorts in the new "kids-and-pets" series, to be called Hal Roach's Rascals, later that year. Fred C. Newmeyer directed the first pilot film, entitled Our Gang, but Roach scrapped Newmeyer's work and commissioned former fireman Robert F. McGowan to reshoot the film. Roach tested it at several theaters around Hollywood to receptive audiences, and some in the press expressed a desire for additional films. The colloquial usage of the term Our Gang caused it to become the series' second official title, with the title cards reading "Our Gang Comedies: Hal Roach presents His Rascals in..." The series was officially called both Our Gang and Hal Roach's Rascals until 1932, when Our Gang became the sole title of the series.
The first cast was recruited primarily of children recommended to Roach by studio employees, with the exception of Morrison, who was already under contract to Roach. The others included Roach photographer Gene Kornman's daughter Mary Kornman, their friends' son Mickey Daniels, and family friends Allen Hoskins, Jack Davis, Jackie Condon, and Joe Cobb. Most early shorts were filmed outdoors and on location and featured a menagerie of animal characters, such as Dinah the Mule. Robert McGowan and Tom McNamara served in tandem as the series' directors during this early period.
Roach's distributor Pathé released One Terrible Day, the fourth short produced for the series, as the first short on September 10, 1922; the pilot film Our Gang was not released until November 5. The series performed well at the box office, and by the end of the decade, the Our Gang children were pictured in numerous product endorsements.
The featured Our Gang stars were Morrison as Sunshine Sammy, Daniels, Kornman, and Hoskins as little Farina, who eventually became the most popular member of the 1920s gang and the most popular black child star of the 1920s. A reviewer wrote of the Farina character, depicted as female although played by a male child, in Photoplay: "The honors go to a very young lady of color, billed as 'Little Farina.' Scarcely two years old, she goes through each set like a wee, sombre shadow." Daniels and Kornman were very popular and were often paired in Our Gang and a later teen version of the series titled The Boy Friends, which Roach produced from 1930 to 1932. Other early Our Gang children were Eugene Jackson as Pineapple, Scooter Lowry, Andy Samuel, Johnny Downs, Winston and Weston Doty, and Jay R. Smith.