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Silent Our Gang
Topic Started: Dec 29 2010, 09:38 AM (510 Views)
Laughing Gravy
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Mom has left the kids alone for the day, and tells Jay to keep Wheezer from chalking up the walls. Well, with a terrible storm brewing, the kids are trapped in the house, and Wheezer proceeds to immediately chalk up every inch of the friggin' walls. So Joe and Farina suggest a plan: Joe's pop is a paper hanger, let's get some of his leftover wallpaper and redo the house. Yikes! Lacking paste, they mix a gooey concoction of flour and pancake mix, and then all heck breaks loose, as through special effects the wallpaper crawls, dances, spits out animal balloons, and generally causes havoc. Mom gets back and everybody, including Petey, gets a good whuppin'.

Although Leonard Maltin dismisses this short in his book on the Little Rascals, it's actually a wonderful 2-reeler, filled with all the stuff that I love about Our Gang in its heyday, with winning kids, goofy-ass special effects, and clueless parents. The kids are sensational, and hey... Allen "Farina" Hoskins was all of 7 years old, while Bobby "Wheezer" Hutchins had not yet reached his third birthday!

Rainy Days is available on the Little Rascals 1927-1929 2-DVD set from Germany.
"I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley
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Laughing Gravy
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I revisited the set by watching Barnum & Ringling, Inc. (1928).

Farina is a li'l bellboy at a ritzy hotel; little Jean Darling is a holy terror who jabs anybody she can reach in the ass with a pin. Just when you think that's what the film's gonna be about, it turns out that Farina has snuck the other Our Gang members in (including Joe Cobb, Wheezer, and Jackie Condon) because they're going to have a circus in the ballroom. For this great event, they've dressed up their assorted animals - cats, mice, goats, donkeys - as giraffes, storks, rattlesnakes (don't ask), rhinocerasusus, camels, etc. The animals break free and terrorize the hotel guests, including Oliver Hardy, Eugene Pallette, and Charles King!

An okay but not too funny short; one wonders why, if they've got an ostrich (which they do) they need to dress it up with a spotted sheet and call it a giraffe, but hey, those kids were darn wacky, weren't they? Yes, they were. Mr. Hardy looks exactly as he does in the comedies he was making with Mr. Laurel at the time, so Stanley's absence is duly noted. The hotel set is lovely, the same one Laurel & Hardy would use in Double Whoopee around the same time.
"I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley
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