Our Gang Creeped Me Out! --- Part One
Parents often impress upon children how good their lives are, and how thankful they should be for what they have. Mine needn’t have bothered. The Little Rascals got the message over with greater clarity and eloquence than any grown-up lecture could have. I thanked Dame Fortune each Saturday morning as I munched Zero bars and saw Stymie and Spanky beg food in The Pooch. I knew better than to complain about a small thing like no color television when Farina had to bathe his little brother in water out of a duck pond. My favorite Our Gangs were the austere early talkies. All the kids were grindingly poor, often homeless, or inmates in an orphan asylum. Adults were dangerous and unpredictable in the Rascal’s world. Yes, these were comedies, but a lot of them scared me but good. There’s a dreadful, screeching old harridan in Mush and Milk that still gives me goose flesh, and the sight of a clearly psychotic Max Davidson with his carving knife poised at Farina’s throat in Moan & Groan, Inc. was the stuff of nightmares. Were kids that much tougher during the Depression? They had to be, for the gang was encircled by hateful, scheming adults who'd make no allowance for their victims' tender age. Early talking Rascals were let loose in a survival of the fittest world where youngsters could be starved, pets gassed (by grown-ups who would enjoy it), and orphans imprisoned in remote, state-sanctioned hellholes. How could my pampered generation complain where faced with such alarming social documents?





A picturesque little general store at our neighborhood's border, very much like the one in Helping Grandma, only this proprietor was no kindly Margaret Mann. She was, in fact, a hard, wizened crone who never forgave that extra penny due for sales tax and always dropped the plain M&M’s on the counter with sufficient force as to shatter the outer coatings. Myrtle also maintained a hairstyle identical to that of Gang schoolteacher Miss Crabtree, the only person I encountered in the mid-sixties to have done so (the resemblance most definitely ending there). I used to imagine that Myrtle was perhaps the embittered latter day fulfillment of all Miss Crabtree’s lost hopes and dreams, assuming, of course, that Miss Crabtree continued her solitary life teaching successive generations of Our Gang kids without hope of raising a family of her own. She and Myrtle did part company in that sense, however, because Myrtle had a husband, who for the few years I knew him prior to his death, acted as a kindly buffer between us and his Mush and Milk wife.



My selection of The Kid From Borneo as the scariest motion picture ever made actually arose from a basic misunderstanding of the story that has dogged me from the day I first saw it many Saturdays ago. I thought the Wild Man really was Uncle George. For whatever reason, I failed to pick up on the letter in the opening scene that explains the whole set-up. The parent's baleful reference to Uncle George as a black sheep suggested to me that this was some sort of genetic missing link that had somehow cropped up in the family bloodline, a dangerous and inarticulate thing that had years ago been sold to the circus as a freak attraction. Now Dickie Moore and Spanky have to go and reclaim "Uncle George" on behalf of parents too afraid, or guilt-ridden, to do it themselves. Uncle George was every bit as terrifying to me as he was to the Gang, all the more so because he was apparently related to them. I never laughed once at this comedy --- still haven’t. When Spanky feeds Uncle George all of contents from the icebox, I know the hapless boy is just buying time before being eaten himself. After drinking port wine, the giant takes off in pursuit of the children with a knife, and for all we know, intends to use it. No amount of slapstick could relieve the dread I experienced when their mother walked into the room to be reunited with her "brother." Believing Uncle George to be this woman's actual sibling, I dreaded her pulling back the bedspread to reveal this frightful thing she had renounced long ago, back now to seek reprisal for his childhood abandonment. Both the parents play these scenes straight. They’re genuinely terrified at the sight of Uncle George. The whole thing became so profoundly unnerving that I finally had to turn the channel whenever The Kid From Borneo appeared. I’ve since wondered if anyone else misread this short in the same way. Watching it again this week, I still consider it open to alternative readings (after all, we never do see the real Uncle George). Such varied menu of interpretation works to its advantage in the end. Some can embrace The Kid From Borneo as one of the funniest Our Gang shorts ever, even as it remains for this viewer the most bone-chilling two-reel horror film of all time.






The Kid From Borneo wasn’t the only Rascals comedy with disturbing images. I’m still stunned when Farina’s playmate whacks him full-face with a heavy board in Lazy Days, resulting in a grotesquely swollen nose for the fade out. When The Wind Blows finds Jackie Cooper’s father roused from bed when his son tries to enter the house, Dad firing a pistol through the front door. Wheezer is repeatedly whipped by a vicious stepmother in Dogs Is Dogs, even as he is starved on a tepid diet of "mush." Free Eats has repulsive midgets posing as babies in order to loot guests at a children’s party --- I always found these characters unsettling and not the least funny. Clarence Wilson and pinch-faced wife steal the gang’s new clothes in Shrimps For A Day, later forcing them to drink castor oil. A pirate with fangs and a blood-curdling growl menaced Stymie in Shiver My Timbers. The giant that corners the gang in Mama’s Little Pirate looks fully capable of broiling them in a stew-pot and eating them whole --- he ranks second only to Uncle George for evoking night terrors. Maybe other kids took these shorts in the proper spirit and laughed through them all. Would that I could have, but clearly mine was a more timid sensibility. Still is, apparently, for even now I find it difficult getting through some of them. Funny how certain responses can again come calling, even after forty odd years. Tomorrow’s Part Two reveals the one-time Our Gang membership of my elementary school band teacher, and the long road I traveled in getting her to finally talk about it.