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- WHO ARE THE ORIGINAL LITTLE RASCALS MOVIE
- WHO ARE THE ORIGINAL LITTLE RASCALS SERIES
- WHO ARE THE ORIGINAL LITTLE RASCALS TV
Hal Roach OK'd the production of a solo “Sunshine Sammy” film in 1921 (bearing the regrettable title, The Pickaninny) the film was a hit and Roach scrambled to assemble a crew of kids for what he originally planned to call his “Hal Roach Rascals.” Meanwhile, Sammy was hailed in the Black press as a “race benefactor” who made both black and white people “forget their troubles,” and W.E.B. According to Lee, the original Our Gang, the first generation, was built around him. “Sunshine Sammy” was not only the first of several generations of Our Gang’s little-black-boy stars, whose fame often outshone the white members of the Gang, he was also the first black actor ever signed to a long-term contract in Hollywood (making the equivalent of $2,000.00 a week).
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Lee reclaims the story of Sammy’s now-forgotten fame, which didn’t outlast the Silent era. This happened to the first certified star of the series, Ernie “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison.
WHO ARE THE ORIGINAL LITTLE RASCALS MOVIE
And yet this was also a time when movie fandom first attained its hysterical-pitch level, when street parades, attended by both black and white fans, were held in honor of cute little “Negro” Our Gang kids. Even Los Angeles movie palaces installed separate, upper-balcony sections of less padded, less comfortable seats known by insulting nicknames like “crow’s nest” or “nigger heaven,” take your pick. The double-edged, contradictory nature of that era can seem so glaring as to be downright confusing: here was a time when even popular black film stars were expected to “go through the back door” or “take the service elevator” to attend their own public events. As Lee informs us, 1922 was both the year the Our Gang comedies debuted and a peak year for the popularity of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States. “It is the story,” she specifies, “of the four African-American stars of Our Gang - Sonny Hoskins, Ernie Morrison, Stymie Beard and Billie Thomas - the gang within the gang …” So instead of just another fan book, this is a cultural history of the Our Gang phenomenon, the public responses to the films and to the “racial aspects” of the comedies.Īs it turns out (and as one would expect), there were indeed “racial reactions” to Our Gang’s seemingly out-of-whack egalitarianism, so odd and so “liberal” for the time as to seem downright subversive and, in the truest sense, avant-garde. Lee could have cast a wider, whiter, more “holistic” lens on things, but that would have meant a much longer book. As Lee discovers in this deeply researched and colorful history, the answers to these questions turn out to be varied, nuanced, fascinating and, at times, surprisingly gratifying. Wasn’t white America uniformly piggish toward its Black citizens? Did bigoted adults just grin and bear it for the sake of a few laughs? Surely there must have been some riots in the movie theaters or lynchings in effigy. Let’s face it, if you're old enough to have been a fan of the black-and-white shorts - which, like many things from that era, had their last real resurgence in the ‘90s, thanks to LaserDisc reissues - you've probably found yourself at one time or other wondering how American audiences during the more or less Klan-friendly 1920s and ‘30s respond to the racially mixed cast of kids making slapstick “mischief” together. He was just 38-years-old.Our Gang, Julia Lee's new book on the history of the much-loved Our Gang comedies of the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, has a provocative subtitle: A Racial History of the Little Rascals. He was found dead on May 10 th 1968 and a note and pills were found nearby. In 1962, he even tried suicide after going on a heavy drinking spree.īeckett checked into a nursing home on after receiving a vicious beating – the circumstances around this are cloudy. He had several run-ins with the law for drunk-driving, drug possession and passing fraudulent checks. Following his acting career, he tried his hand at real estate but things never really worked and that’s when the problems started.
WHO ARE THE ORIGINAL LITTLE RASCALS TV
His career scored a big break in 1954 when he was cast as the comic sidekick ‘Winky” of the popular TV show Rocky Jones, Space Ranger. He also attended the University of Southern California but dropped out because it was too difficult to juggle an acting career and classes. After he left the show, he got regular child acting gigs and even found consistent work as a young adult. He played the best friend of another show favorite named George “Spanky” McFarland.
WHO ARE THE ORIGINAL LITTLE RASCALS SERIES
He appeared in the Little Rascals series from 1934-35. Scotty Beckett was born in Oakland, California in 1929.