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| Episode Commentary |
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Canned Fishing Released:
February 12, 1938 Skip
episode synopsis and go directly to commentary "The Little Rascals" and Little Rascals characters © and TM King World Productions, Inc. This website based in part upon a television series distributed by King World Productions and Turner Entertainment Company / MGM. Alfalfa has slept over Spanky's house for the sole purpose of playing hooky the following morning. How? Spanky plunks a large block of ice on Alfalfa's chest, and makes him stick his feet in a bucket of ice water, all in the hopes that his mother will be fooled into thinking Alfalfa has the chills and should stay home from school. With Spanky as self-sacrificing chaperone, of course. Spanky's mother is at first bamboozled (incredibly) by the ruse. But at the back door, Buckwheat and Porky show up to ask if their two older buddies are ready to go fishing yet, and in so doing spill the beans about the hooky scheme. Spanky's mother (played by Wilma Cox, Mr. Hood's wife in "Feed 'Em and Weep") decides to teach Spanky and Alfalfa a good lesson, so she goes shopping and leaves them in charge of silent but mischievous Junior, Spanky's little brother (that'll teach the two of them!)    Above: Publicity stills from "Canned Fishing". Immediately, Junior gets into all sorts of trouble, climbing into a kind of outdoor barbecue/furnace structure, getting himself filthy from head to foot. Alfalfa and Spanky, joined by Buckwheat, try to get Junior cleaned up. But the little darling wriggles away and wedges himself in a hotbox sauna. Inexplicably, Alfalfa and Spanky climb inside the sauna and attempt to push Junior out. You guessed it: Soon all three get locked in the sauna. Junior manages to free himself through the head hole cut in top of the hotbox, but Alfalfa and Spanky remain trapped. Their pleas to Junior go ignored, and soon the heat from inside the sauna ignites some firecrackers Alfalfa has in his back pocket. Buckwheat, by the way, is atop an open washing machine, spinning around and around as if on a turntable. There is not any value in explaining how he got there, so we'll skip the details. Spanky's mother returns from her shopping spree just in time to restore order, and Alfalfa, Spanky, and Buckwheat all hightail it out of there for school, vowing never to play hooky again (to their credit, they keep their promise, at least during the six remaining episodes of the Hal Roach era.)
"Canned Fishing" is probably the worst Hal Roach-produced Little Rascals episode Alfalfa appeared in, and could very well be the worst Hal Roach Little Rascals episode ever. With its main characters' unconvincing, over-rehearsed delivery of painfully awkward dialogue, "Canned Fishing" presaged the mostly dreadful MGM Little Rascals episodes that would begin production later that year. There are so many things wrong with "Canned Fishing", so many lapses in credibility, that we'll just list them below in bullet-point fashion without further ado: •Why do Spanky and Alfalfa feel it necessary to literally put a block of ice on Alfalfa's chest to help him seem sick? Couldn't Alfalfa have simply made believe he had chills?
•Didn't they think that Spanky's mother would have checked Alfalfa's chest and discovered the ice, thereby exposing their scheme? She didn't, but the boys didn't know that beforehand. Why did they even take a chance? •When
we see Alfalfa sitting on the bed with a towel around his head and
his feet in the same pan of water as before, we soon learn that
the pan has warm water in it. Just a few minutes earlier, it was
filled with ice water. How did this •When
Spanky's mother tells them that they can stay home, the second after
she closes the door, Spanky yells out "Hot-dog, it worked !"
Is Spanky's mother deaf? Wouldn't she have heard Spanky's shouts
of glee over fooling his mother •Alfalfa and Spanky's plan is to go fishing after she leaves to go shopping. Didn't they think that Spanky's mother would come home from shopping before they got back from fishing? Or did they plan to cross that bridge when they came to it? •When
Buckwheat shows up for the second time in the episode, Alfalfa and
Spanky decide to trick him into watching Junior for the day. Question:
Did they really expect Buckwheat to think that watching Junior would
be a fun thing, and that he should be happy about it? Throughout
the series, Buckwheat was nothing if not wise to Alfalfa and Spanky's
scheming. Incidentally, Porky had the right idea by disappearing
from this short after his first scene, a sequence which was probably
the only bright spot in the entire film. •If a small boy were inside a sauna, what would be your first plan of action to get him out? Wouldn't it be to open the door and pull him out, or at least just wait until he got tired of it and came out on his own? What you probably wouldn't do is crawl, along with your pal, inside the sauna to join the small boy you are trying to rescue, with the intention of pushing him out of the sauna, then allow the door to close behind you. Or maybe you would, if your name were either Spanky or Alfalfa in "Canned Fishing". •Unless we are mistaken (and we could be), the idea of a sauna is for someone to sit in it, much in the way Alfalfa and Spanky do during "Canned Fishing". If the door locks behind you upon closing, wouldn't it be mandatory for there to be a way to open the door from the inside when you have finished with your sauna? Or is the idea for you to sit there sweating until somebody comes and lets you out? One of the more amazing aspects of "Canned Fishing" is the fact that one gets the nagging impression that director Gordon Douglas is actually padding a ten-minute short film, with the endless variations on the "Junior, will you let us out or not?" dialogue. When compared with the pace and energy of such Little Rascals classics as "Pay As You Exit" or "Rushin' Ballet", "Canned Fishing" feels like it stretches on forever. The failure of this episode can probably be traced to the fact that it did not learn from the lessons of "Little Papa", another disappointing effort (but not nearly as bad as "Canned Fishing"); that is, whenever the boys are put in the position of being surrogate adults, watching kids even younger than them, we are usually in for a long day (with the notable exception of 1933's pre-Alfalfa "Forgotten Babies".) And to think that this film immediately followed the double-barreled successes of "Mail and Femail" and "Our Gang Follies of 1938"! It
should probably come as no surprise that 4alfalfa.com gives "Canned
Fishing" One cowlick (out of a possible five) Sorry,
boys... |
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"The Little Rascals" and Little Rascals characters © and TM King World Productions, Inc. This website based in part upon a television series distributed by King World Productions and Turner Entertainment Co./ MGM. Episode commentary © 4alfalfa.com |
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