Little Rascals, C/D/C on Ts/POO/DOO?

little rascals --> in cold blood --> tell them willie boy is here --> barretta --> that creepy guy in lost highway

there's an 80-film box set out today (list: $400)

uh, check that; it's $90. The complete Sopranos box is the one that's $400. "I saw Alfalfa at the Bada-Bing last night..."

Michael Atkinson:

The Our Gang films were neorealism in utero, and we may have no better filmic expression of the Depression. That is, not the schoolbook history of the decade but the Steinbeckian reality of its wide dusty streets, its collapsing social fabric, its literally threadbare wardrobe, its adult citizenry too wracked with pragmatic dread to pay attention to their children. Just as you can learn about life in postwar European middle-class apartments from the various New Waves of the '60s, so can you feel the heft and grime and worry of the real Depression in Roach’s shorts. (That includes the matter-of-fact use of blackface and other post-minstrel-show conventions, which have been much discussed elsewhere.) Certainly, nowhere else in American film culture is there such an intense and extended meditation on the verities of domestic poverty; here, used farcically but always also poignantly, the fact of children scrounging for food and shelter is sometimes the narrative foreground, but is more often, rather amazingly, the background to other scenarios. The holes in sweaters, the mooning over unobtainable food in bakeries and butcheries, the gruel the kids must eat in orphanages seemingly less out of Dickens than out of Jacob Riis—even in the later set-bound shorts dominated by Spanky and Alfalfa (Carl Switzer), life was lived on the edge of gone-to-seed farms, amid urban tenements, and in crowded one-room schoolhouses. Sometimes the kids had parents, and occasionally these tall, strange, officious aliens were even comfortably bourgeois, but often the gang members didn’t even seem to have homes, and the single rich kid in the area was always a smug, villainized capitalist right out of Upton Sinclair. Hardly a single short from the decade’s first years can go by without an incident or mention of corporal punishment, dealt out for baldly unjust reasons....

http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/children-of-paradise-20081120

Just got my copy of this set. Too bad I have to actually work today!

It's great, I've been watching them from the beginning. My favorite was Hide and Shriek. It's interesting to see how they stack up against my memory of them.

Love how the kids are always doing shit: having car races, going fishing, opening detective agencies...

"Forget it Spanky, it's Chinatown."

Stymie Is My Hero: (peeling an artichoke) "It may choke Artie, but it ain't gonna choke Stymie."

ten hours of shorts tonight on TCM

that set is $30 on amazon today
http://www.amazon.com/gp/goldbox

Bonedust

^ search obv

This image is currently making the rounds on facebook, with the obligatory "like this if you know who this is."

http://heustess.com/pictures/gang33.jpg

...and the thousands of comments are really an eye-opening look into the world's mindset. Every tenth person wants to know "where's Alfalfa?" or "Darla is missing." Um, the series ran for over 20 years; not every kid is in every episode. Ditto Pete the Pup. Others are certain that one of them must be Robert Blake (maybe due to his recent appearance on Piers Morgan) -- again, no. Some of them say they went to school with one of them, or had one as a neighbor. Possible, but unlikely.

Also, every ten comments: "hey, there's Barack Obama!"

A weird one to me is "I'm too young to know who this is." DVDs and Turner Classic Movies do exist, do you only know actors from your lifetime?

As a child I found them quite creepy.

As an adult I've mostly seen the silent ones.

I also found them creepy. They were visibly children, but they were such weird children they might have come from another planet. And there was a lot of cruelty masquerading as innocent fun. Even the way they talked was strange and stilted, with odd pauses and peculiar inflections - probably because they were struggling to remember their lines, but how was I to know that?

And there was a lot of cruelty masquerading as innocent fun.

Have you met children?

I was a child, but that aspect of childhood did not amuse me one bit, especially as a frequent recipient, but TLR seemed to present it as if it were amusing.

Yes, they seemed grotesque, like a lot of comedy I suppose.

Judging by the third post, someone has always been a jackass.

Saw this last week at MoMA; "Happy birthday, Mr Hood, happy birthday to ya..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7Ygfb2vdNQ

lol at 9-year old beef

"my natal anniversary!" *sobs*

"He is."
"He is not"
"He is"
"He is not"
"Let's ask Mister Hood. Is Flash Gordon greater than Tarzan?"

"Now, boys, as far as these Gordon and Flash Tarzan fellows go..."

Now to see what they actually said

RIP Jean Darling, a cast member 1927-29

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/jean-darling-dead-gang-actress-820789