Bear Facts

An OUR GANG Comedy Short.

To impress Darla, Alfalfa tells her he's a famous bear tamer. Her dad, a circus owner, just happens to have a bear costume; now he's determined to get Alfalfa's real BEAR FACTS...

This little film tries hard for laughs and delivers a few. Highlight: Alfalfa's dance with the ‘bear'.

This Hal Roach comedy short, Bear Facts, is the one hundred sixty-fourth entry in the "Our Gang/Little Rascals" series and the seventy-sixth talkie. Bored with just playing checkers, Alfalfa and Spanky-along with Buckwheat and Porky-find themselves marveling at the arrival of new neighbors-Darla and her father, who owns a circus. That gives Alf an idea: He'll brag about training bears to get himself and his pals jobs. The father knows he's not on the level so he disguises himself as a bear to get those ideas off his head. This was a hilarious entry in the series with Alf's reactions in seeing the "bear" and his attempts to "train" him a highlight. So on that note, Bear Facts is highly recommended.

On the whole I generally favor the two-reeler (20-minute) episodes in the Rascals series over these later one-reelers. As this later series progressed, it actually regressed through their heavy-handed, moralizing tone; the stories seemed increasingly intent on "teaching the kids a lesson". Other Gordon Douglas-directed episodes of this period of a similar ilk included "Canned Fishing". "The Awful Tooth" (directed by Nate Watt) was another.

In "Bear Facts" we have Darla's dad, a circus man, spook the kids (but particularly Alfalfa) into cowardice by dressing as a trained bear. Unfortunately, these shorts proved a harbinger of things to come, with preachy, unfunny MGM episodes, after series mentor Hal Roach sold his rights to the title Our Gang.

The present episode even has little Porky overextend his abilities by making him deliver a couple of unintelligible full-fledged lines!