Election Day

I nominate this Our Gang comedy as one of the most child-unfriendly ones I've seen...and I've seen nearly all of them. It features the kids being uncharacteristically mean and the final portion just is nuts...and it makes you wonder if the writer was insane!!

The story begins with some sort of election for the gang. Here is where the film started to lose me...each candidate threatened to punch voters in the nose if they didn't vote for them. Poor Farina doesn't wanna get hit and he spends the entire short looking for a way to escape this fate. Kind of cruel stuff. At the end, he wanders into the middle of another election...one with gangsters. All of the sudden, they all being shooting at each other....with machine guns!!! And, Farina and his kleptomanica sister are stuck in the middle of it! It ends with their mother spanking Farina and almost spanking the baby. Who thought any of this was funny????!!!!

This Hal Roach comedy short, Election Day, is the eighty-first on the "Our Gang/Little Rascals" series. Farina and his little sister Pleurisy are supposed to deliver their mother's laundry but both Joe and Jay won't let them cross a certain line in the ground until the election between them is over. So Farina and his little sibling try to disguise themselves to fool them. When they finally go to town, they get mixed up with some crooks wanting to steal some ballots from an adult election and the cops chasing them. I'll just now say this was another funny one directed by Anthony Mack, nephew of usual Gang director Robert F. McGowan. So that's a recommendation for Election Day. P.S. This was Jackie Condon's final Gang appearance. He would periodically reunite with his former teammates but never get any work from this point on despite trying as late as the '50s. He eventually became an accountant at Rockwell International alongside other former teammate Joe Cobb for many years before passing on October 13, 1977, of cancer related-causes, about one month after the original pressing of the book, "The Little Rascals: The Life and Times of Our Gang" by Leonard Maltin and Richard W. Bann was published and released.

This film revolves around Election Day, a day on which Jay R. and Joe are fighting to get votes. They warn the kids that they'll be socked in the jaw if they don't vote for them, but the kids are just trying to go about their business, namely Farina. His mother wants him to deliver laundry to her clients, but he can't go anywhere without being harassed by the gang. To escape them, he dons several costumes including that as an older woman, a dancer, and a scarecrow.

There are some funny parts of the film, but for the most part the gags are very standard and therefore tired. One occurs when a goat gets drunk. However, one part is rather cute where the kids sit on an ant hill and run away scratching. Wheezer is particularly good in this scene which could have easily been hammed up; he stays very natural in it.