When Buddy McDonald Arrived in the Neighborhood

In the 1930 Our Gang short “School’s Out,” teacher Miss Crabtree calls on a boy named “Buddy O’Donnell.”

This little guy had lots of freckles, prominent ears, and an attitude. He had appeared in the two preceding Our Gang shorts: “Pups Is Pups” and “Teacher’s Pet.” In the second he was also called Buddy.

Most kids in the Our Gang movies shared names with their characters, though the studio could give them nicknames like “Buckwheat” and “Wheezer.”

Richard W. Bann and Leonard Maltin therefore went looking for a child actor named O’Donnell as they prepared their 1977 book on the Our Gang series, and then again as they revised it in 1992. But they came up empty.

In July 2001 a friend alerted Bann that an eighty-year-old California man named Bud McDonald had played Buddy. For some unknown reason, actress June Marlowe had referred to him under a slightly different name, sending researchers off on the wrong path.

Bann quickly contacted Thomas “Bud” McDonald (1922–2008), confirmed his identity by email, and interviewed him, sharing that new material on the official Laurel and Hardy website in two parts.

It’s a lively conversation, with McDonald offering vivid memories of making movies for the Hal Roach Studio, remarks on other events in his early show-biz career, and frank details about the rest of his life.

In particular, McDonald revealed some behind-the-scenes details which I don’t recall seeing elsewhere.

His first movie, “Pups Is Pups” (Lucky Corner; IMDB; Dave Lord Heath), was unusual in setting the gang’s neighborhood next to big industrial buildings, not in a residential or rural area.

That effect was achieved by shooting some scenes in urban locations but filling out other long shots with matte paintings on glass. McDonald remembered seeing that special effect come together:

We were acting out at the ranch and they’ve got a camera and a mirror and a miniature set showing a huge building, and they’re all hooked up together. I guess it was what they call a glass shot or a matte shot or something. All I know is we did our scenes without those other buildings, but when we saw the rushes, there they were up on the screen! . . . [At rushes] You looked at what you did, and the kids would kind of tease each other, playfully, saying, “Look at Chubby,” or whatever line we might fire off at the screen.

The vertically augmented shots include the Roach studio’s city intersection set, familiar from many other movies, but this time given some tall background buildings.

Even the ballroom where the kids take their pets for a dog show appears to have been jazzed up with a matte painting over the orchestra’s heads.

The regular Our Gang director, Robert F. McGowan, doesn’t seem to have used that technique in other movies. I therefore view “Pups Is Pups” as one of several shorts he made starting in the late 1920s trying out cinematic techniques: extreme close-ups, shooting up from under glass, cutting off the adults’ heads, and so on. He rarely went back to those tricks in later movies, though.