The Mysterious Mystery!

This Hal Roach comedy short, The Mysterious Mystery!, is the thirty-third in the "Our Gang/Little Rascals" series. Little Rich Boy Adelbert Wallingford (Jackie Condon) has been kidnapped. Mickey the Mastermind, a.k.a Sherlock Hawksaw, rounds up his team to attempt to capture one of the people responsible. I'll stop there and just say there's quite a high number of thrills in this one as we're presented with awesome point-of-view shots of a car on the road as well as a plane in flight with Mickey, Joe, and Farina in extreme peril. Oh, and you'll love how inventive they are in capturing a person! This was one of the most exciting Our Gangs yet! So on that note, I highly recommend The Mysterious Mystery! P.S. This marked the series debut of Eugene "Pineapple" Jackson.

Mysterious Mystery!, The (1924)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Mildly entertaining if rather unfunny flick from Our Gang has Mickey Daniels doing an impersonation of Sherlock Holmes and Joe Cobb being Watson as the two try to discover the whereabouts of a young rich kids who has gone missing. While trying to find the kid the gang must also try and avoid a dumb detective also working the case. The more of these Hal Roach/Our Gang shorts I watch the more amazed I am that I'm not laughing at many of them. For a 20-minute comedy they flow fairly well and there are usually some interesting visuals but I'm still not laughing. This entry in the series offers up a fairly entertaining story but once again we're left without many laughs. The first portion of the film deals with the "investigation" as the kids end up arresting the wrong person but this here turns out to be one of the highlights as our detective gets caught in a very interesting way. The second half deals with the kids getting on an airplane and it taking off leaving Farina on the wing. Obviously the kids weren't in any danger but the poor background footage doesn't help things.

As I watched, I had no idea why, but series regular Ernie 'Sunshine Sammy' Morrison was not in this short and subsequent Our Gang shorts and another actor, Eugene Jackson, has taken his place. Considering how important Morrison was to the Gang, I wonder why the replacement occurred. This is especially odd as soon after this, Morrison made several more appearances in Hal Roach films....just not the Our Gang ones. So, I did some reading and apparently Morrison's family took him out of the series and put him in Vaudeville! I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time.

The story finds a rich and lonely kid (Jackie Condon) kidnapped. Well, he actually seemed happier as a result! As for the Gang, they had been reading Sherlock Holmes stories and it inspired them to become young detectives. And, their first case was to find this kidnapped boy! This isn't a bad idea, as the police detective assigned to the case was apparently not a very good one! But the kids get in way over their heads...and at one point they even take off in an airplane!! It really does make you wonder where there parents were all this time!!

In many ways, this film seems different than the typical Our Gang short...and not just because Morrison was gone. In many ways it actually played like a movie serial with all the action and suspense. It also really made me laugh seeing the gang all in disguise as detectives....including their pooch! All in all, a most enjoyable albeit odd film which finds the kids literally risking their lives to be detectives....especially the fearless Farina!