Second Childhood

Released: April 11, 1936
Director: Gus Meins
Episode length: 18:28 (3/34)
Alfalfa's screen time: 8:42 (3/34) 47% (22/34)
Lines of dialogue spoken by Alfalfa: 22 (25/34)
Song: "Oh, Susanna" (solo, then with Grandma and Spanky)
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Skip episode synopsis and go directly to commentary

Hobson brings Grandma her morning meds—"blue pills, pink pills, green pills", she complains. As Hobson leaves, a remote-controlled airplane buzzes in through an open window and smashes a vase atop a side table in the room. The perpetrators are Alfalfa, Spanky, Darla, Buckwheat, Porky, and mop-topped Dickie De Nuet. They run up to the entry gate to Grandma's property, trying to track the whereabouts of their toy. Spanky strides into the yard and starts rooting through the side shrubs. Grandma pokes her head out through the French doors.

Grandma: What are you looking for? Trouble?
Spanky: No, my airplane!

Grandma lets Spanky inside, where he sees his plane on a side table, along with a vase that it has destroyed. He grabs the plane, then attempts to innocently slide out the door, but Grandma pointedly asks what he intends to do about the vase. She tells Spanky it will cost seventy-five cents to replace the vase, but Spanky picks up a piece of the wreckage, the underside of which apparently has remnants of the original price marking of twenty-five cents. Spanky points this out, to Grandma's—and Hobson's—chagrin. When Spanky tells Grandma that he and his pals "ain't millionaires", Grandma confiscates the plane and tells Spanky to shoo until he can come up with the seventy-five cents.

Grandma stifles a giggle as Spanky leaves and reports back to the other kids. He says that the old lady wants seventy-five cents for the vase, and they all decide that she's an old...crab. The operative word "crab" is supplied by Grandma herself, as she sneaks up on the group of kids. Spanky does a double-take when he realizes Grandma is behind him and has furnished him with the missing word. In fact, his beanie shoots straight up in the air to the accompaniment of a slide whistle—a neat, unexpected, and unobtrusive little sight gag. Spanky then explains that the group can't scrape together the money, but offers to do yardwork to work off the debt. Grandma agrees, reluctantly, and ask Dickie De Nuet to fetch a rocking chair. He balks until she says "please"; Grandma says the magic word only after Dickie tells her that his pop is a traffic cop.


Studio publicity photo of the cast on the set of
"Second Childhood". Would you trust this group
to clean up your yard?

Dickie then drags a rocking chair to Grandma as Buckwheat brings the garden house around. As Grandma rocks back and forth, the runners on the bottom of the chair pinch the water pressure off and on. A confused Buckwheat tries to manage the sputtering water flow and finally hands the hose to poor Porky while he goes over to yank the hose out from under the rocker. As Buckwheat does this, the pressure immediately switches back on. Of course, a stunned Porky, who had been peering into the hose, gets his face drenched. He drops the hose and staggers off in a daze (the same gag that victimized Buckwheat in "Teacher's Beau".)

Alfalfa and Spanky come along with the lawn mower, but can't budge it an inch. Finally Grandma gets up to show 'em how it's done. As they each grab a piece of the handlebars, Alfalfa, Spanky, and Grandma start darting up and down the lawn with the mower. Hobson and the maid look on in shock. The next shot sees Grandma going solo with the mower, Spanky lounging in the rocking chair, and Alfalfa plopped down on the stoop. All of a sudden, Alfalfa starts singing "Oh, Susanna". Grandma asks him if he's sick, to which Alfalfa sweetly replies, "I'm singin'!" Grandma and Alfalfa then bicker briefly about Alfalfa's rendition of the song. She grabs Alfalfa by the hand and leads him and Spanky inside. The three, who are now becoming fast pals, sit down at the piano. Grandma starts playing, and sings a rather dull version of "Oh Susanna" to which Spanky and Alfalfa exchange disapproving glances.

Alfalfa then sings his version of the song (get more info at Alfalfa's Greatest Hits, or stop by later). Grandma breaks in to suggest they do it together. After a couple bars of the Alfalfa/Grandma duet, Spanky joins in, completing a disconsonant but happy three-part harmony. Somehow, Spanky's slingshot gets caught on the corner of the piano bench, and it snaps up and hits Grandma in the behind. Spanky shows a curious Grandma how to use the weapon. After a few practice shots, Grandma gains some rudimentary proficiency and gets an idea of what she can do with the slingshot.

We then see another part of the house. Grandma has instructed Hobson to collect every pill bottle in the house and line them up on the table so she can slingshot them to smithereens. Alfalfa and Spanky help Grandma get ready. Grandma then begins methodically smashing all the pill bottles, accompanied by Alfalfa and Spanky's encouraging cheers. When only one pill bottle is left, Grandma asks Alfalfa to hold a mirror so she can smash it Annie Oakley-style. The projectile veers off target but it hits a wall-mounted light fixture and the bulbs crashes down onto the bottle and smashes it anyway. Grandma, Alfalfa, and Spanky celebrate. Next, cocky Grandma wants to try roller skating. Even Spanky and Alfalfa try to discourage her, but Grandma insists, and with the assistance of the kids, she is soon careening around the entire house—slicing draperies in half with a sword, overturning furniture, etc. The roller derby queen is followed by the cheering kids and the apoplectic maid and Hobson.

Grandma becomes attached to a serving cart the kids have climbed up on. On one of her corner turns, the cart gets catapulted out through the French doors, and the kids fly into a kind of large birdbath pond. On her return trip around, Grandma passes by the doors and stops to watch the kids. Spanky encourages her to join in. Announcing "For twenty years I wondered what that thing's for", she backs up to get a running start, and dives headfirst into the pond. As she comes up for air, Alfalfa and Spanky slap her on the back gleefully, and both give her hugs and kisses as the episode fades to black.

Contemporary Hal Roach
Studios poster for
"Second Childhood".

Commentary
It is rare indeed for grownup actors to outshine the appeal of the Little Rascals themselves. Johnny Arthur did it as Darla's father in "Night 'n' Gales" and "Feed 'Em and Weep". Maurice Cass came close as the officious headmaster in "Arbor Day". But unquestionably the actor who most clearly outshone her child co-stars, at least in the Alfalfa era, was the amazing Zeffie Tilbury as "Grandma" in "Second Childhood". We have spoken elsewhere in 4alfalfa.com about the "iconic" appeal of the Little Rascals, i.e. the ability of certain images and scenes to be remembered above others when one thinks back to their days of watching the Little Rascals as kids. No image is more of a Little Rascals icon to us than the roller-skating Grandma in this episode. But what all us kids didn't know while watching Grandma careen around her ornate mansion with the kids in hot pursuit is that Ms. Tilbury was legally blind by the time she made "Second Childhood", which makes her performance all the more astonishing.

Tilbury was born in London in 1863 and appeared in 68 films in her career, beginning with the ironically-titled 1917 silent "Blind Man's Luck". She was perhaps best known for her small but memorable role as another Grandma, of the Joad family, in "Grapes of Wrath" (Tilbury's frequent refrain as Grandma was "Praise God for vit-tory!") Just prior to "Second Childhood", Tilbury "replaced" the recently deceased Thelma Todd as the Gypsy Queen in Laurel and Hardy's "Bohemian Girl", which also featured Darla Hood ("The Bohemian Girl" was the film which required Darla to dye her dark hair blonde.)


Zeffie Tilbury as Grandma Joad
in the immortal "Grapes of Wrath"

As described by Leonard Maltin and Richard W. Bann in The Little Rascals, The Life and Times of Our Gang (Three Rivers Press, page 168), Tilbury was helped around the set by her maid and appeared to need substantial assistance until the camera rolled and she got into character, giving nary a hint that she was sightless. Also interesting is the tidbit provided by Maltin and Bann that William Thomas ("Buckwheat") was initially afraid of Tilbury because of the crotchety disposition she had to project in the early portions of shooting ("Life and Times", page 168).

The transition of Grandma from foe to friend is very subtle and effective. She is won over primarily by the feistiness of Spanky, who is not afraid to engage in toe-to-toe verbal battle with both Grandma and her stuffy butler, played by Sidney Bracey in another wonderful grownup performance (Bracey would return the next year as veterinarian O.T. Hertz in "Three Smart Boys".) Despite her protestations to the contrary, it is fairly obvious from the beginning that Grandma is just waiting for an excuse to bust out of her stuffy cocoon. The warmth between her and the kids, particularly Spanky and Alfalfa, is convincing, and one can only surmise, and hope, that this camaraderie extended to "real life" on the set.

The performance of mop-haired Dickie De Nuet is also worth noting. Appearing in a handful of Little Rascals films in the mid-thirties, De Nuet more than held his own with the veteran Tilbury during a running gag involving his insistence that Grandma say "Please" and "Thank you". Grandma's initial reluctance to engage in these niceties is softened after De Nuet tells Grandma that his "pop"—who always tells his son that saying "please" is the polite thing to do—is a traffic cop.


Little Rascals coloring book, depicting
kids ca. "Second Childhood".

Alfalfa is still firmly entrenched in the "second banana" phase of his Little Rascals career, but he has his share of endearing moments and dialogue. There are three that stand out notably: First, his disarming reply of "I'm singin'!" to Grandma when she asks him if he doesn't feel well after hearing him break into an off-key rendition of "Oh Susanna"; second, after they sit down at the piano and Grandma gives the song a stab, Alfalfa interrupts her and says, "You're flat, you're flat..." The irony of Alfalfa criticizing somebody else's singing is too obvious to expand further. The third memorable Alfalfa moment in "Second Childhood" is his glee at Grandma's unexpected proficiency with the slingshot. As Grandma smashes pill bottle after pill bottle, Alfalfa jumps up and down excitedly and at one point, when Grandma asks, "I'm becoming some shot, aren't I?", Alfalfa replies "You're tellin' me!"

The fact that much of Grandma's roller skating trip around the ground floor of her home features rear-screen projection does nothing to diminish the timeless appeal of this sequence. The episode comes to a satisfying conclusion as Grandma dives into a large pedestal pond to join the kids, happily hugging and kissing her newly-found friends.

From start to finish, "Second Childhood" is fast-paced and fun while still managing to incorporate several subtle touches into the proceedings.

4alfalfa.com gives it

5 cowlicks (out of a possible 5)

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