Shivering Shakespeare

I'm an Our Gang/Little Rascals fan, and I enjoy this episode immensely, I never tire of it. "Shivering Shakespeare" is about the kids acting in an adaptation of "Quo Vadis" made by Mrs Kennedy, who is conveniently hiding behind the curtains to help out the kids with the classic and a bit too complicated dialogue. The best thing about this episode is watching the kids act as kids; they have a natural grace that is fortunately not ruined by the fact that they are kid actors; you would say that they are just being themselves and practically unaware of the cameras.

Some of the best gags have Chubby as a protagonist -not having learned his dialogue well, he has taken notes on his robe, only to find out he's put on the robe inside out. There's also the gang of the kids who aren't in a play and have decided to turn it into a pie-throwing fest. 'Farina' is also at his best, scolding the teacher for "talking too much" when she's helping the kids with the forgotten dialogue. Very enjoyable is also Mary Ann Jackson, the leading lady, cheeky and adorable!

This one had me laughing until the pie fight at the end. I was sorry to see it end that way. I thought the adult participation was very amusing and expressed the way the people would really feel about each other if this had been produced in real life. It was very natural and personal. You don't see natural man to man interactions any more. The scenes with the men dressed as animals were irresistible. The children acted like children would at that time, too - it was all very believable. And the lady in charge of this drama was the perfect spinster librarian type everyone liked to ridicule, only no more nor less than she, too, would have been in real life. The mothers were also very motherly and warm and attached to their children. I could relate to them - far more than I can relate to the mothers I meet today, most of whom seem to feel very little for their children. I feel a very warm affection for the time when family love was still so much a part of people's lives.

The Gang is involved in a really, really lame play. None of the kids know their lines and one mistake after another occurs. In addition to the kids, Officer Kennedy (Edgar Kennedy) is on hand--and he's just as untalented as the rest. Later, some mean kids in the audience begin throwing food at the actors as they put on the lamest version of "Quo Vadis" in history.

Aside from not being all that funny, this short suffers from relatively poor sound--which is made worse because the short is MUCH more talky than usual and there are no closed captions on the DVD. At the end, they had a giant pie fight (some of it in slow motion) but WHY they did this was never at all apparent. A limp short with little to recommend it.

I first saw this as a kid (THE LITTLE RASCALS first went on TV the year I was born) and fairly recently bought this on DVD. In between, I watched it on the occasions it was on and took careful notes at 1) the pie fight itself and 2) how racist some of these parts were: Farina as a Nubian slave, doing voodoo, for example. I think Roach and McGowan would have been beaten to death if they'd tried to do that now.

Notice how the pie fights in The Three Stooges' HALFWITS' HOLIDAY and IN THE SWEET PIE AND PIE resemble this one...and this film came out a few years before their initial contract with Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures. There was obviously some inspiration from SS and Laurel & Hardy's THE BATTLE OF THE CENTURY for these films...remember, at that time, they all stole from the best, each other!!!

One more note: Laurel & Hardy buffs, that bake sale lady was none other than Dorothy Coburn, who also appeared in TBOTC-the 'flapper' getting into her car and getting it in the rear end. It always escapes me why she was never credited?

This installment was a disappointment. The dialogue suffers from very poor sound quality. Normally that wouldn't detract, but this episode is almost all talk. Some of the gags seem a bit corny even by 1930 standards. On the other hand, the performances are typically good. Chubby proves once again that he was one of the most wooden actors of his time-- which only adds to his appeal, of course. The pie fight sequence is the highlight of the film. I enjoyed the slow-motion shots, which must have been a bit experimental in their day. Definitely not the greatest "Our Gang" short.