The Froggy Files (coming soon)

"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.


In the late thirties Hal Roach, the genius primarily responsible for the Little Rascals, decided to focus on creating feature-length comedies as opposed to short films. Accordingly, in 1938 he sold the entire Little Rascals/Our Gang property— actors, contracts, production staff— to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

MGM devoted the best production resources at its disposal to its new property. But almost from the beginning, something wasn't quite right. The story lines of these newer episodes quickly devolved into moralistic, preachy, and at times, propagandist messages that seemed to stress teaching its viewers a lesson rather than making them laugh. Gone also was the charming spontaneity of the Roach era. MGM would never, for example, consider preserving some of the malapropisms and blown lines that found their way into the Roach episodes.

But perhaps the biggest reason for the series' sharp decline after Roach sold it to MGM was the performances of the actors who populated it. The main carryovers from the Roach era were getting older: Spanky, Alfalfa, Darla, Porky, Buckwheat, Butch, and Waldo. Much of their appeal faded as they crept towards adolescence—Even our hero Alfalfa, the oldest of the group, began to effect a sort of shrill, over-the-top manner in many of his performances. To make matters worse, the younger actors introduced to the series— the "new breed" who were anointed as the next generation of Rascals stars— simply weren't very appealing. One of these characters was named "Froggy" for his weird, raspy, Popeye-like voice (which was not, by the way, the result of any special sound effects: it was really the young man's voice) Froggy was played by an actor named William Laughlin. Under more skillful direction and better stories, Froggy coulda been a contender, but it was not to be. The character of Froggy is, to us, the MGM years' main archetype, and it is Froggy after whom this section is named.

Alfalfa's MGM years were not totally without merit. There were a handful of episodes that were passable, most of which, we should note, revolved around Alfalfa's character: "Alfalfa's Aunt", "Alfalfa's Double", "Goin' Fishin'", "Time Out For Lessons", and, in particular, an episode called "Men In Fright", in which Alfalfa accidentally inhales laughing gas while in a hospital and virtually turns into an Our Gang version of the spaced-out Blueboy character that would be seen some thirty years later in Dragnet 1967.


Alfalfa, eight miles high in "Men
In Fright".

Alfalfa appeared in twenty-six of these little-seen MGM episodes (amazingly, almost as many as the thirty-four Hal Roach episodes in which he appeared.) Although even the best of these later Rascals films never approached the quality of Alfalfa's Hal Roach episodes, they are an important chapter in Alfalfa's career, and deserve a serious look. That is what we intend to do. We will notify our friends and visitors via "News/Updates" when the "Froggy Files" section of 4alfalfa.com is complete.

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