Birthday Blues

"Birthday Blues" tells the story of Dickie, who wants to buy his mother a new dress (well, not really new -- it's a 1922 model). To get the money for the present, he holds a party with prizes in a cake, with kids paying per slice. The only problem is that Spanky and Jackie Lyn have added a few surprises to the prizes -- soap, shoes, gloves, and so on. Dickie earns the money, but faces his father's wrath for making a mess. Will he get his mother's present in time?

"Birthday Blues" is memorable, if only for one of the most unique sound effects in movie history. Who knows how the Hal Roach effects people created it; it sounds something like "wow-eep...wow-eep..." If you heard this effect as a kid, you never forgot it.

The family melodrama is a bit much to take, and let's face it - Dickie's dad is a jerk, and you get the feeling he doesn't learn his lesson or will be more attentive to his wife in the future. Watch "Birthday Blues" for the laughs and forget the corny melodrama. 8 out of 10.

The best of the "Our Gang", "Little Rascals" short films. The sound effects of the cake as it comes out of the oven are hilarious. The mess in the house was awful, but necessary for Dickie to get the money for the birthday dress for his mother (and the man at the store threw in the shoes for nothing!)

Everybody won in this episode; The father learned an important lesson, Dickie was able to buy the dress, the gang had a great time at the party, the mom was so happy that her son would think this much of her to spend all the time and effort to get the dress, the dress shop owner made a little money and Spanky is all dressed up to go to church!

Watch it over and over again!

Surely, Birthday Blues is eloquent about Our Gang members and their families. Dickie and Spanky's daddy was at first disagreeable, to point of giving Dickie severe spanking for bringing strange children into the house, without his permission, and making such a mess that the kitchen looked like the municipal dump! Dickie told Mom that he did that to raise money to buy her birthday present, which Dad had forgotten to do for second straight year, and when Gordon Douglas delivered a dress for $22.50, Dad made Mom send it back. (If he could not afford to pay for it, one wonders how the family could afford the water cooler!) The beauty in this Our Gang-er is that Dad became a lot nicer, learning a good lesson from his son. What this episode ALSO brought out is the increased understanding not only about the kids in Our Gang, but about boys. All boys are not identical to each other because EVERYBODY-- boy and girl, man and woman-- is UNIQUE! There are no two boys who are exactly alike, nor any two girls either, nor any two grown men or women. Dickie's and Stymie's experimenting in the kitchen may not have been THAT prevalent among boys in the Thirties (before feminism), but there WERE boys who liked to cook even then! MY father learned to cook from his mother and his maternal grandmother. So, what Dickie and Stymie did HAD parallel examples in REAL life even then. One cannot blame Donald Haines' calling the cake a fake, as HIS "prize" was a MOUSE TRAP! Another kid drew a trick snake (which somehow I used to think was a live baby alligator! All in all, a wonderful Our Gang-er, teaching that there have always been INDEFINITE ways for boys to be boys, often good-natured instead of mean-spirited.

This film begins with Dickie and Spanky's mother becoming quite upset. First, her jerk-face husband forgot all about her birthday. Second, instead of apologizing and being a man about it, the jerk-face then bellows and screams like someone giving birth to a 25-pound baby! You really have to wonder if maybe the writers overdid it in making the father so nasty. It gets worse, as late in the film the dad starts smacking Dickie after he and his friends try to earn money to buy mom a present--and make a HUGE mess in the process. And, in the end, the dad seems a bit repentant and not so nasty...and you can only assume he finally got medicated or lobotomized.

I know I sound harsh, but this film really missed the mark. Had they made the father the least bit nice and in control of his anger, it might have worked. However, instead of me noticing the humorous middle portion, all I could think was that someone should call Children's Services! A rare failure and too dark for my taste.

By the way, another negative about this one were the annoying cake sound effects. Cakes shouldn't make noises. And, if they did, they'd sound NOTHING like this one!