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.
