In 1922, producer Hal Roach came up with the idea for a new short film that just featured kids being kids. Our Gang debuted that year, and would quickly be followed by another film, and then another. By the time the series would end in 1944, there would be a total of 220 shorts and over 40 young actors and actresses would have been part of the main cast for a time. The series found new life in the 1950s when Roach began syndicating the shorts for TV. Due to copyright issues, he had to market them under a new title, The Little Rascals. A new fledging syndication company, King World, would take over the rights in the early 60s, and stations would continue to program the old shorts to high ratings, particularly the ones featuring the mid-to-late 1930s cast, including Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer, Darla Hood, and George "Spanky" McFarland.
By the 1970s, though, interest was beginning to run dry. Kids were not nearly as interested in the shorts, many of which were approaching 50 years old. Stations were regulating the program to less and less desirable timeslots, if not dropping them altogether. While the series was progressive for its day by showing Black and white children playing together as friends and equals, there was still plenty of jokes that played on harmful racist stereotypes, requiring some of the shorts to be edited and others to be dropped from the package outright. To salvage their investment, King World decided to revive interest by creating a new, updated Little Rascals. After an attempt for a live-action revival never got past the pilot stage, the company turned to animation, and The Little Rascals Christmas Special would debut in 1979.
The special was, probably to its detriment, deliberately old-fashioned. Set during the Depression and using the most familiar characters to the public, the plot largely revolves around a variation on The Gift of the Magi. Spanky and his little bother Porky are delighted when they overhear their single mother order what they think is the Blue Comet train set, the best, most elaborate train set on the market. But she, who cleans houses for a living, was actually ordering a vacuum cleaner with that same brand name. When she discovers the boys are fully expecting the train on Christmas morning, she decides to return her new, much-needed winter coat and use the money to buy the train instead. When her sons see how much she needs a new coat, though, they get the rest of the gang (consisting of Alfalfa, Darla, and Stymie) to figure out how to raise money, which includes spreading chicken feathers on a random yard and attempting to convince the homeowner to hire the gang to shovel the "snow". It takes a while to get there, but of course there is a happy ending.
This is enough plot to fill about ten or so minutes of screentime. The problem is that the special is nearly 24 minutes. Characters seem to talk very slowly, which helps honor the "early talkies" aspect, but it helps the idea that nothing much happens. And nothing much does.
For TV animation of the era, the special looks pretty good, thanks to veteran animators Charles Swenson (who would go on to work on the early seasons of Rugrats) and Fred Wolf (who had won an Oscar for his Animated Short The Box and would go on to work on numerous animated series, including DuckTales). The script is by Rankin/Bass's normal in-house screenwriter Romeo Muller.
Of the voice cast, kid actors voiced four of the Rascals, with Phillip Tanzini, who voiced Spanky, going on to a long career as a voice-over actor, and Robby Kiger, who voiced Porky, going on to co-star on the 80s detective series Crazy Like a Fox and playing prominent supporting roles in the films Children of the Corn and The Monster Squad. Stymie, for whatever reason, was voiced by an adult, Al Fann, who had a long career both as a voiceover artist and as an on-camera actor. For the adults, the producers got two of the Rascals seen in the special. Matthew Beard, who had played Stymie in the 1930s, had a vocal cameo as a butcher, while Darla Hood had the much bigger role as Spanky and Porky's mom. Veterans Cliff Norton, Frank Nelson, and Hal Smith had small parts as some of the adults in the special, and Ike Eisenmann, who had starred in the Disney sci-fi film Escape to Witch Mountain and its sequel, had a small role as the bully Butch. Playing the role of a street-corner Santa was another veteran actor, Jack Somack. While presumably Hood and Beard signed off on their likenesses and names being used in the special, I'm not sure if George McFarland, Eugene Lee, who had played Porky, or the estate of Carl Switzer did.
There's little doubt that this special, and indeed the entire Our Gang franchise, is touched by tragedy. Switzer had died in 1959 after being shot in a dispute over a dog training fee (the career that Switzer pursued after retiring from acting). Hood would suddenly die about six months before the special would premiere, and Beard would die in 1980. McFarland would die in 1993 at 64 of a heart attack, a few months after his final role, appearing in a cameo as himself on Cheers.
If the hope was that the special would significantly revive interest in The Little Rascals, it didn't work. This was 2 1/2 years after Star Wars, and among the big holiday movies out that season were The Black Hole and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Kids were probably not interested in toy trains or kids who wanted toy trains. While the Rascals were used for PSAs after the special, it wouldn't be until 1982 that a full-fledged animated series, produced by Hanna-Barbera, would run for two seasons on ABC. In 1994, a full-length live-action film, set in the then-present day, would be a moderate hit, and a straight-to-video sequel would follow a few years later. As for King World, they would move well beyond The Little Rascals in the 1980s, after they began to syndicate arguably the three biggest hits in the history of first-run syndication: Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy!, and The Oprah Winfrey Show. The company was bought by CBS for $3 billion in 1999. The rights to The Little Rascals remain with CBS to this day.
While The Little Rascals Christmas Special isn't a lost classic or anything, it is a pleasant, if slow, way to spend a half-hour. Its primary drawback is that it seems ridiculously out of step with the time period in which it was produced. It seems to be for people who want 1930s nostalgia, rather than 1970s nostalgia.
Next time: He has a new album, so of course NBC gives him a new special.
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