Canned Fishing

It has the same ineffable charm all the Hal Roach OUR GANG movies had, but not much else. MGM may have nailed the lid on the series' coffin, but CANNED FISHING probably marks the beginning of its terminal illness. Its kids-asking-for-trouble-by-playing-hooky-from-school-to-go-fishing plot has little to enliven it except a few mildly cute turns by the cast's younger children. We've seen this story done a billion times already, and it almost never worked. Does anyone really enjoy seeing the urchins taught a moral by condescending adults? I guess so; Roach's following (mostly mediocre) shorts included BEAR FACTS and THE AWFUL TOOTH as well...then MGM took over, and we all know how that ended up.

This Hal Roach comedy short, Canned Fishing, is the one hundred sixty-third entry in the "Our Gang/Little Rascals" series and the seventy-fifth talkie. Alfalfa and Spanky are planning to play hooky with Alf getting a block of ice on his body in order to convince Spanky's mother of his ailment. When she answers the doorbell, Porky and Buckwheat inadvertently spill the beans! So now she decides to teach her son and his pal a lesson by foisting Junior on them while she goes shopping...This was quite a funny short with the deadpan reactions of Junior one of the highlights. So on that note, Canned Fishing is another worthy entry in the series.

Oddly, in the Our Gang multi-DVD collection, this one comes last--though it actually was not the last film of the series from Hal Roach. You can tell because it features Spanky in co-lead--and he was actually absent from the last several shorts in the series because the studio had loaned him out to RKO for a full-length film. He'd return once the series was bought by MGM and they produced their own (and rather inferior) shorts with Spanky, Alfalfa, and a few new kids such as Froggy and Bobby Blake.

The plot is pretty familiar here. Alfalfa and Spanky are planning on playing hooky--so they fake being sick. However, their plan is foiled when dumb 'ol Porky and Buckwheat spill the beans. So, when Spanky's mother finds out, she decides to teach them a lesson. She pretends that Alfalfa is indeed quite sick--and leaves Spanky's little brother with him to watch--making it tough for the boys to still go fishing. But he boys have a plan. Can they still manage to get in some fishing?! Well, not if Junior has anything to do with it, as he CONSTANTLY gets into things.

Well, Junior is very cute and does some of the exact same sort of things Spanky did when he first began in the Our Gang films. In fact, there's a lot to this one that is familiar. While this might seem bad, it's not all that bad since this sort of plot was used a lot back when the series was better written and funnier. While familiar, it's also quite watchable.