That's Not Ohtay: Will the Real "Little Rascals" Please Stand Up?

Hal Roach's series of kid-centric shorts under the name "Our Gang" or later "The Little Rascals" are nearing a century old, and their legacy lives on today as families still watch the shorts online (at least the ones that aren't culturally problematic) and purchase direct-to-video remakes that nobody really asked for.

But the early years of the Hal Roach shorts were pretty chaotic -- there were the major players that everyone remembers, like Spanky and Alfalfa, but kids came and went so commonly that is became easy to pass yourself off as a former Rascal, just because there were so darn many of 'em.

In this 1953 episode of "To Tell the Truth," the second round invites our panel to guess which of the three heavyset men on stage is the real Jack Bothwell, the actor who played "Freckles" in Hal Roach's "Little Rascals" shorts.  (Skip to 9:00 to get to the point of reference.)




The panel fails to guess the correct Bothwell, and a picture is shown of "Freckles"as a child.  But even if they'd have all guessed correctly, they'd still have been wrong -- while that was, in fact, Jack Bothwell, there was never a character named "Freckles" in the Little Rascals, and Bothwell was just a restaurant host.

According to this piece by Mark Evanier, Bothwell went on to do talk shows continuing to perpetrate the fraud and, quite possibly, never getting called on it.  It was a different time, when researching someone's identity would take some effort.  (Unlike currently, when it takes little effort, but it often not done due to laziness - witness any given death hoax on Facebook, or the wonder that is Literally Unbelievable.)

But while Jack Bothwell may have been the first person who impersonated a Little Rascal, he was far from the only.  In 1990, a grocery store clerk named Bill English talked the producers of "20/20" into thinking he had played Buckwheat -- an impressive feat, considering William Thomas Jr., the actor who actually played him, had died in 1980, and there were a number of references to his death in the news after Eddie Murphy had played him on "Saturday Night Live" being assassinated.

The episode was noticed by George McFarland, the actor who had actually played Spanky in the series, who went on to confront him on "A Current Affair," as seen below:



Impressively, English sticks to his claim, making for a fantastic look at self-delusion.  English passed away in 1994, and I'm unsure if he stuck to his story until his death.

"Little Rascals" appropriation can even happen in the days of easy fact-checking.  When Mollie Mae Gottschalck Barron passed away in 2008 at the age of 87, several obituaries reported that she had been the child actress who played "Darla" in the shorts.  Darla Hood, the actual actress, had died in 1979, something that a simple Google search could have verified.

The ruse had apparently been going on a while.  This 1999 interview commits to Barron's "Darla" fantasy, claiming that she played it for a year while Minnie Ruth, the "other actress who portrayed Alfalfa's girlfriend, was on sick leave."  A cursory search for Ruth's name alongside the Little Rascals reveals nothing other than links to Barron herself.

It's a heck of a lot tougher now to con your way into having people believe you're someone you're not -- or at least more random.  All it takes is a few people too intent on believing the lie to bother checking the facts.  We may have seen the last of the "Little Rascals" phonies, but the next great short-term media con could only be a Tweet or two away.

Celebrate Bugs Bunny's 75th birthday by watching his 50th!

Today marked the 75th anniversary of Bugs Bunny, who made his debut in Tex Avery's 1940 classic A WILD HARE.  And there's plenty of points around the web celebrating such on occasion, so instead of just bringing up Bugsy, why not check out the festivities the last time he had an important birthday? 

1990's HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BUGS: 50 LOONEY YEARS is about as ridiculous as TV specials get, filled with guest stars (Seriously, look at this cast of guest appearances) and containing very little content about the guest of honor himself.  In fact, much of it is presented as though Bugs is an  actual person with an acting career rather than, well, going into the actual history of his animated exploits.





Here's what you get:

Little Richard singing "That's not all, folks, we want more!" with a cavalcade of the guest stars you'll be seeing -- you know, animation staples like Jon Voight, Fred Savage and Harry Anderson. 

"Pro-Daffy Duck protesters" (including "Moonlighting'"s Allyce Beasley) opposed to the Bugs Bunny event. 

An "Entertainment Tonight" profile of the rascally rabbit, which serves as a full "biography" of Bugs' rise to fame claiming that he grew up in Brooklyn and was soon discovered and became a superstar.

Shatner. 

Fake talk show segments featuring Joan Rivers, Geraldo Rivera and Phil Donahue and Sally Jesse Raphael.

A montage of a cross-dressing Bugs backed by Robert Palmer's "Simply Irresistable."

A shirtless Chuck Norris working out.

A very strange conversation between Bill Cosby and Raven Symone that I'm not sure Symone is aware is being filmed.

Dan Quayle jokes.

Milton Berle in a bunny outfit claiming that he's the real Bugs Bunny.

Shadoe Stevens shilling for Acme products.

Hulk Hogan.

Tex Avery, Frank Tashlin, Mel Blanc and Fritz Freling are mentioned in passing, and Freling and Chuck Jones have brief interview segments, but for the most part, it's fully committed to the idea that Bugs Bunny is a real-life being, forcing the concept into as many deeply committed gags as it possibly can while tossing out as many random (and usually unidentified) vintage Warner Bros. cartoon clips as it can. 

There are moments of brightness, such as a clever Daffy Duck segment in which he meets his agent and clips of Mel Blanc recording Bugs' voice, but most of it is just random footage of Bugs and celebrities paining themselves to come up with something original to say.

Happy birthday, Bugs!   I hope your 75th is much better than your 50th.

Get a lot out of your Henenlotter with the BASKET CASE 2 promo reel with Joe Bob Briggs and Dr. Ruth

From "the company that brought you RED SCORPION and MOONTRAP," Shapiro Glickenhouse, came 1990's double dose of horror oddities from Frank Henenlotter, and this promo reel, meant to entice video stores into picking up the titles, certainly tries to sell them as movies that "everybody's talking about."  We get clips of Joe Bob Briggs talking about the film on "The Tonight Show," Dr. Ruth diagnosing Gabe Bartalos, and a segment from "Good Day, New York" from the set of BASKET CASE 2.

The VHS trailer for THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW

Believe it or not, until 1990, you didn't have the option of seeing ROCKY HORROR at home, making rehearsing for the midnight shows virtually impossible unless you had a raggedy, third-generation bootleg.  The film's long-awaited release on VHS was controversial, partially because die hard fans feared that this would be the end of the midnight movie circuit (it wasn't), but also because the VHS wasn't released at a sell-through price, causing thousands of fans to shell out $90 for a VHS tape.  But, heck, at least there was a new mini-documentary on the tape.

Radio Shack helps you accessorize your new satellite system in 1990

One of the great mysteries of our time is how Radio Shack is still in business.  "The end is neigh," we've been told for years, but despite things like this and this, "The Shack" carries on, giving a much-needed home for unwanted remote control cars and cords that can connect your flip phone to your fax machine.  This 1990 promotional video features the dullest man they could afford talking about the potential that your satellite television set up has.

Chill out with Julee Cruise's "Rockin' Back Inside My Heart"

Musician and songwriter Julie Cruise, whose birthday is today, is best known to genre film fans for "Falling," the theme to "Twin Peaks," but it's not her only collarboration with David Lynch.  She was also the singer of BLUE VELVET's "Mysteries of Love" and collaborated with Lynch on her album "Floating into the Night" and contributed to INDUSTRIAL SYMPHONY NO. 1, a stage performance committed to video in 1990.  Here's her track from that, and it's about as dreamy and etherial as it gets.

Evening Entertainment - Mojo Nixon faces off against Pat Buchanan on music censorship in 1990

Like every political pundit show ever aired, this episode of "Crossfire" doesn't change any minds, but it's certainly a lot of fun to watch psychobilly musical Mojo Nixon face off against Pat Buchanan on the topic of what to do about "offensive" music." "Why is the evidence necessary?" asks Jean Dixon, a Missouri state rep who also wanted to ban "The Normal Heart" from colleges.

The Batman OnStar commercials of Andrew Davis with Curtis Armstrong as the Joker

Birthday boy Andrew Davis is a famous, big-time director of THE FUGITIVE, UNDER SIEGE and COLLATERAL DAMAGE, but in 1990, he directed a series of Batman-centric ads for OnStar, the system that allows you to unlock your car by remote.  (It was a big deal in 1990.)  Here they all are, combined into one really strange-looking narrative featuring Michael Gough returning as Alfred and Curtis Armstong as the Joker.  (Batman is not played by Michael Keaton, but rather Bruce Thomas, who later voiced Jim Gordon in the SON OF BATMAN animated film.  So you can used THAT as a trivia point along the lines of "What actor has played both Batman AND Jim Gordon?")

Evening Entertainment: Jonathan Heap's "12:01 PM" starring Kurtwood Smith

The concept of a person repeating the same time period over and over until they get it right is probably most associated with GROUNDHOG DAY, but Heap's Oscar-nominated short (based on a 1973 short story by Richard Lupoff) considers the idea in the guise of a character drama, with ROBOCOP's Kurtwood Smith as a mild-mannered man who finds himself stuck in a loop. It was remade as a made-for-TV thriller by FOX a few years later, but this is the sort of high-concept, low-budget science fiction short films are made for.

Watch This Thing - "Wanda," a 1990 short film about a cat

Cat shorts don't have to be goofy or cute or ironic.  Produced at Cal Arts, Ruth Hayes' beautiful 4-minute short film is a tale of ownership, desire and envy -- and a compelling use of mixed media. 

Halloween Dance Party! Dean Cameron - He's Rockula

SUMMER SCHOOL's Cameron is vegetarian vampire Rockula in 1990's flick of the same name -- and Cameron is still in the music video game, helming Steel Panther's latest, "Pussywhipped."

Watch This Thing - Roddy McDowall's role-playing group fends off a killer baboon in 1990's SHAKMA

Make no bones about it -- SHAKMA is the greatest film about a role playing group on a college campus that has to fight for their lives against a deranged baboon featuring Roddy McDowall and BLUE LAGOON's Christopher Atkins that you'll ever see. Prove me wrong, kids. It's streaming on Netflix, too, so if the trailer is enticing enough, you can watch he whole darn thing.

Watch This Thing - Anthony Perkins in 1990's darkly comic pilot for "The Ghost Writer," from the writer of "Sledge Hammer!"

Anthony Perkins never quite found another great role after PSYCHO, and in the '80s, he embraced his most popular character in full, starring in several sequels and embracing a variety of twisted roles.  One of his last was in, of all things, a sitcom, in the 1990 pilot "The Ghost Writer," playing a widowed bestselling horror author with a goth son (RIVER'S EDGE's Joshua Miller) who remarries a woman with a daughter suspicious of the goings on that surround them.  It could have been an "Addams Family" for the '90s - it's written by Alan Spencer, who lent "Sledge Hammer!" similar sensibilities, but the series never got past the pilot stage.