Thursday, June 26, 2008

school's out!!! time to celebrate with spanky and the boys

well this was the last day of the year for kids to be in school and i waved goodbye to another year of teaching - my seventeenth! it seems appropriate to celebrate the occasion with something school-related! how about "our gang?!"

i can’t remember the first time i saw an episode of the ”our gang” series, but it seems to me it was probably sometime in the late sixties on a hot summer afternoon sitting on a nylon slip-covered couch drinking kool-aid
back in the days when the kid’s programming didn’t really start until late afternoon.

our gang was shot between 1922 when it was a silent series and was known as hal roach’s rascals. the concept was incredibly popular and carried through to the advent of talkies and then right on through until 1944. considered one of the best known and most successful series in cinema history, the series eventually totalled 220 short films and one feature film.

the series was known to me as the little rascals and was reprised much to the joy of my own children in a feature film that wavered between capturing the original naivete, innocence and acceding to the demands of the much more fickle movie going youth of the last twenty years.

today is a special day though as school is officially done for another year and i thought it would be more than appropriate to settle back with a short but funny movie from a simpler time . . .
"came the brawn" . . . pt1.
"came the brawn" pt. 2.

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