Fire Fighters

This Hal Roach comedy short, Fire Fighters, was the second in the "Our Gang/Little Rascals" series. It begins with a duck dressed to the nines who tries to woo a hen before being chased by a dog and the duck's wife! Then we segue to Ernie "Booker T. Bacon" Morrison who's trying to saddle a mule with varying results. He's also entertaining his "sister" Farina (Allen Hoskins in his debut) by having "her" swing courtesy of a horse swinging his tail attached to a rope that helps the swing move! The gang arrives with little Jackie Condon (as Roosie) becoming chief because he has the fireman's hat. Oh, and there's a still of the alcohol inside a shed that becomes the "water" when the gang uses it for their excursions of putting fires out. I'll stop there and just say that while I was pretty amused by what I just described, it wasn't hilariously so. In fact, part of me felt bored watching the thing since there wasn't much in visual gags except when the slow-motion pace of various animals in a state of drunkenness happens. Directed by Robert F. McGowan and Tom McNamara who also did the cartoons depicted in the intertitles.

"Fire Fighters" is the oldest remaining Our Gang comedy...the second in the series. While it starts off oddly and meanders a bit, the plot is one that would be repeated in many variations over the next couple of decades in this series.

When the film begins, it's all about ducks, a chicken and a dog all dressed up in clothes and acting like people. It really has nothing to do with the rest of the film and it really looks as if the Hal Roach Studio just tossed it in because they didn't want to waste the footage!

When the actual story begins, the kids decide they want to be fire fighters. In true Our Gang fashion, they create go-cart style fire engines...and the hot water tank used in early fire engines actually is a still being used by moonshiners!

This film, more than later Our Gang comedies, really meanders. As a result there are fewer laughs, though it is all pleasant. And, like so many of the early films, Farina's gender still isn't established in the film...and in a few of the later ones, he is billed as a she! Interesting.

As Hal Roach originally conceived it, the Our Gang Series would be about kids and their animals. Soon enough it became about the kids themselves and the animals were split off into a separate series, the Dippy Doo Dads, but this one, the oldest surviving one in the series -- although not the earliest released -- starts with a bunch of animals stuffed into clothes for the first three minutes until we see the first sign of humans: Ernest Morrison, Alan Hoskins as Farina, and their goat and mule. And then we watch for five minutes as Morrison harnesses the mule for his father before heading off to the Gang at the "Robers' Cave"

This was the essence of Our Gang, incident without clear plot or reason, because that's the way you lived your life as a child. The world didn't make much sense to you, but it probably would some day. Oh, there might be plot, there might be a purpose, but there are other things to worry about.

Say, have you looked at the news lately? Not so bad a philosophy.

Whilst achieving success with Harold Lloyd, the 30 year old Hal Roach (the astute business man that he was) began developing a new product in the packaging of 'Our Gang' who later became known as 'The Little Rascals'. They weren't successful at this stage, but Roach knew that they would explode during the speakeasy evolution.