“The urchin who treads on the garden hose”

Film narrative began with the figure of a mischievous child.

The very first movies were “actualités” documenting how people, animals, or machines moved around in real life. The novelty and spectacle of seeing those actions on screen provided all the entertainment.

As one famous example, in early 1895 Louis and Auguste Lumière first exhibited their improved cinématographe with footage of workers leaving their factory. Exciting!

That summer, the brothers decided instead to stage a fictional event for their camera. The result is the oldest known movie with a plot (beginning, middle, and end) and the oldest film comedy.

The Lumières claimed to take inspiration from a prank played by their baby brother Edouard, born in 1884. If so, Edouard may have taken inspiration from comics, since cartoonists had been drawing variations on this prank since he was a baby. Antoine Sausverd rounded up examples in this article for Topfferiana. Lance Rickman discussed their cinematic influence in an article titled “Bande dessinee and the cinematograph: visual narrative in 1895.”

A journalist for the newspaper Les Allobroges published an interview about this movie with the Lumières’ former gardener Jean-François Clerc in 1949. In translation:

Suddenly, one fine summer morning, the two young men came to find me at the end of the garden where I was working, followed by that little rascal Edouard, all three carrying an extraordinary set of equipment. Louis set up the tripod, Auguste added his crank box on top, and Edouard went to get a garden hose a few steps away. Here was a dark lurking mystery in which I was to pay the price, while raising myself to the rank of the world’s leading film actor.

When everything was set up, while Louis was already holding the handle of his curious box, Auguste said to me: “François, take the jet and water in front of you, without worrying about us. Edouard, by pressing with his foot on the hose, will give you or take away water.” Things went as agreed and that’s how I watered in jerky jets, the water sometimes splashing in my face, while Louis and Auguste kept turning their famous handle, continually directing the glass eye of this box at me.

No footage of this action featuring Edouard has survived. Clerc may have misremembered his costar, or that first footage was a test of concept and the brothers came back for a more planned filming. Louis Lumière himself said in a 1948 interview:

Although my recollections are not very accurate, I think I may say that the idea of the scenario was suggested to me by a farce by my younger brother Edouard, whom we unhappily lost while an airman during the 1914-1918 war. He was then too young to play the part of the urchin who treads on the garden hose. I replaced him by a young apprentice from the carpenter’s workshop of the factory, Duval, who died after performing his duties as chief packer of the works for almost forty-two years. As regards the waterer, the part was played by our gardener M. Clerc, who is still alive after being employed at the works for forty years.

Different sources say young Duval’s first name was Daniel or Benoît.

In late 1895 the Lumières began to exhibit a 40-second movie variously titled “Le jardinier (The Gardener),” “Le jardinier et l’espiègle (The Gardener and the Mischief-Maker),” and finally “L’arroseur arrosé (The Sprinkler Sprinkled).” That movie has a clear plot. The boy steps on the gardener’s hose. Puzzled, the gardener peers at the nozzle, The boy hops off the hose, making water squirt into the gardener’s face. The gardener chases down the prankster and spanks him. The gardener goes back to work while the chastened boy walks off (with a glance at the camera).

The next year, the brothers filmed another version in a different garden with more depth of scene. This time, the prankster was played by a 22-year-old factory employee named Léon Trotobas. In 45 seconds the action comes full circle with the gardener spraying him back. (Some writers treat this as the first version. I’m agreeing with the sequence described by Movies Silently and others.)

“L’arroseur arrosé” was such a hit that the Lumières commissioned Marcellin Auzolle to draw a poster showing an audience enjoying it—the oldest known movie poster to show part of an actual movie.

Other moviemakers like George Méliès copied “L’arroseur arrosé,” sometimes exactly, sometimes trying to top the action. The 1899 British version, “The Biter Bit,” runs more than a minute and shows the gardener chasing the prankster (another man) around a tree before spraying him. Thus film slapstick grew.

Are You Gonna?

“Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” performed by WJM (William Lipton, Jeremy Yun, and Max Simas, with guest bassist Collin Simas, uploaded to YouTube on 9 May 2013)

“Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” performed by The Runarounds (William Lipton, Axel Ellis, Jeremy Yun, Jesse Golliher, and Zendé Murdock, uploaded to YouTube on 10 Feb 2023)

The Runarounds was formed in 2000 for a television show that finally went out on Amazon Prime this month. The five musicians cast as slightly younger musicians for the series have been playing and writing songs together in the meantime, and they’re now touring the east coast.

In the series premiere, the characters bond over the song “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?”, originally by Jet. As the cast notes in interviews, and as this pair of videos shows, most of them have had fun playing that song since they were kids.

“To do it exactly like Douglas Fairbanks”

In 1976 Robert Parrish, an Academy Award–winning film editor and less heralded film director, published his first memoir, Growing Up in Hollywood.

Parrish opened his life story with a incident about himself as a seven-year-old in Columbus, Georgia. He was born in 1916, so that would have occurred in 1923 or so.

This lively anecdote, full of evocative detail, starts with an older boy urging little Robert to fetch some curtains so the neighborhood gang can recreate Douglas Fairbanks’s famous stunt in The Black Pirate: sliding down a ship’s sail with a knife stuck into the canvas to slow himself down.

Robert found a sheet, which the gang hung from an oak branch. The older boy supplied a butcher knife. While most of the fellows slapped wooden swords at each other on the ground, they sent the seven-year-old up the tree to try the stunt first. The scene ended [SPOILER!] with a broken arm.

While he recuperated, Robert’s mother took him to her third viewing of D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms. During that show, he saw a “coming-attractions trailer for Intolerance,” with a shot of director Griffith setting up the action. From then on, Parrish wrote, he was interested in who was in charge of making the movies.

In 1926, the Coca-Cola Company transferred Robert’s father to Los Angeles. He got the chance to work as a child actor in the background of some significant movies, including a couple of Our Gang shorts, Speedy, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Big Trail, and City Lights.

Performing with Fairbanks in The Iron Mask, he learned the secret of that stunt in The Black Pirate. He even got to try it with all the unseen safety effects working. Thus, as in many well-crafted narratives, the details Parrish laid out early came back to have added meaning later.

However, the dates in Parrish’s story don’t add up. The Black Pirate was released in 1926, the year when the family moved to Hollywood, and not three years before.

Intolerance was released in 1916, and Broken Blossoms in 1919. So would a first-run city theater have shown Broken Blossoms four years after its release, with a “coming-attractions trailer” for a movie that was three years older than that?

It seems clear that Parrish’s memories of early movies ran together in his head. In assembling his memoir, he cited movies that had become part of the film studies canon by the 1970s but probably weren’t what he watched in 1923.

But what about the story of trying to slide down a sheet like Douglas Fairbanks and breaking his arm? That was a more particular and memorable experience than sitting in a cinema. And yet Parrish described that stunt being inspired by a movie that didn’t exist until three years afterward. Furthermore, there’s no sword-fighting melée at that point in the The Black Pirate.

I haven’t found any review that points out that discrepancy. In his 2008 biography of Fairbanks, Jeffrey Vance quoted Parrish from his memoir and an interview without noting the age gap. The Golden Globes website silently changed little Robert’s age from seven to ten to match the release date of The Black Pirate.

I offer a different explanation. The movie that the Columbus gang were trying to emulate wasn’t The Black Pirate but Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood, released in 1922 (YouTube). That movie showed Fairbanks sliding down a tall curtain—just as a whole bunch of guards run around with swords. The stunt in The Black Pirate was designed to outshine the earlier scene. And it did, both on screen and in Robert Parrish’s memory.

Marking the Many Media of Oz

Tori Calamito, host of the Oz Vlog, is doing a live online event called “Defying Gravity: The Evolution of Oz from Page to Stage to Screen” for local libraries.

The event description says:

This exclusive Zoom program offers a rare glimpse into over a century of Oz storytelling, from L. Frank Baum’s original book series to the latest Broadway productions and upcoming film. The Oz Vlog will share treasures from her extensive memorabilia collection while exploring how the Land of Oz has evolved across different media. Whether you’re a longtime fan of the 1939 MGM classic, a Broadway enthusiast who’s seen Wicked multiple times, or curious about the upcoming Wicked: For Good, this program has something magical for everyone.

Come prepared to be amazed by the depth and breadth of Oz’s influence on entertainment, and leave with a deeper appreciation for the wonderful world that has inspired some of the most popular characters of all time. This program is sponsored by The Oz Vlog who is donating her time to this event!

This event will take place on Wednesday, 30 July, starting at 7:00 Massachusetts time. Folks can register for this event through the Burlington Public Library.

In a similar vein, on Saturday, 16 August, Worldcon in Seattle will feature a panel discussion on “Oz: America’s First Multimedia Franchise,” organized and moderated by Eric Gjovaag.

That description is:

Known around the world for the famous film adaptation, The Wizard of Oz is back in everyone’s minds thanks to the current two-part Wicked movie. But Oz started life as a popular novel, which then spawned a Broadway musical, a series of other books, early silent movies, and more. Oz is a franchise that always grows and changes with the times. Learn more about the origins of The Wizard of Oz and how it has been reinterpreted on stage, television, and computers and in movies, comics, toys, games, and more from 1900 to the present day.

Panelists are A. J. Hackwith, J.R. Dawson, and Terri Ash. Eric will also moderate a panel the next day on “How The Wizard of Oz Has Shaped Science Fiction.”

Easy Cases Make Good Law?

The Washington Post and Forbes reported on how five US Supreme Court justices recused themselves on a copyright infringement case.

Four of those justices have book deals with Penguin Random House, a party in the case. There’s no obvious reason for the fifth justice’s decision, but people suspect some similar financial interest.

Some court observers saw these justices’ choice as an indication that they were paying more attention to ethical issues. Others saw danger in how many justices have income from book sales, potentially making it impossible for them to rule ethically about publishing law.

I have different thoughts. First, book income pales in comparison to the other outside income justices receive for appearing at exclusive legal conferences, especially compared to the work involved.

Furthermore, Justice Clarence Thomas has received millions of dollars in value through vacations, vehicles, and other presents for no work at all, and then repeatedly failed to disclose those gifts.

After the Thomas scandals broke, conservatives tried to build up Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s book deal into a comparable brouhaha. Justices had been publishing books for years before that (Thomas among them) without attracting so much criticism.

So while I do see the potential ethical problems when judges have financial interests aligned with large media companies, I don’t think that’s at the top of the list of what needs to be fixed at the Supreme Court.

Second, I looked at the case that the five justices recused from, Baker v. Coates et al., through this PDF. A man decided that Ta-Nehisi Coates had plagiarized his self-published book and sued not only Coates but lots of other people and corporations involved in other things Coates has written: The Atlantic Monthly, Disney (as owner of Marvel Comics), Oprah Winfrey and Apple (for broadcasting an interview), and so on. 

The filing includes pages and pages of side-by-side comparisons between Coates’s writing and the plaintiff’s—which show very little similarity. Unlike some plagiarism claims that make the news with obvious parallels, such as Pete Hegseth’s senior thesis, this one reveals no smoking guns. It doesn’t even offer water pistols.

A lower court dismissed that claim with prejudice—i.e., totally swatted it away. An appeals court upheld that decision. The Supreme Court’s inaction cements that result, but I think it’s extremely unlikely the court would have accepted this case anyway. The justices probably wanted nothing to do with it.

“Seeing all those curls lying on the floor”

Frances Hodgson Burnett finished Little Lord Fauntleroy with young Cedric still wearing the same clothes and hairstyle as when he started.

For boys who disliked that book’s fashions, however, the moment a lad could have his “love-locks” cut became a rite of passage. It was akin to transitioning from skirts to breeches, and later from breeches to long pants. It signaled not only growing older but also moving away from maternal influence.

The slapstick comedian Moe Howard described such a moment in his memoir, Moe Howard and the Three Stooges, published posthumously in 1977. Born in 1897 as Moses Horwitz, he recalled having ringlets as a boy in elementary school:

My school career began in September 1903, when I was six. Whenever I attended school—which in later years wasn’t very often—I was constantly fighting. I fought on my way to school, in school, and on my way home. As I said before, my hair had grown very long, and every school day I would awaken a half hour before everyone else so my mother could wind finger curls through my hair; they reached almost to my shoulders. There were about twenty of them in all, and they resembled a bunch of cigars stuck on my head. Knowing that it was my mother’s greatest delight to spend that half hour arranging my curls, I didn’t complain. But soon it became the battle of my school career.

After recounting lots of fights over how “girly” he looked, Howard recalled meeting a couple of boys who befriended him anyway—but still didn’t like the hairstyle.

I gazed into Donald’s mirror and saw my curls hanging down, a good ten inches long. I glanced over at Donald and Rusty, two normal-looking young boys. I looked in the mirror again, and then something on Don’s dresser caught my eye. A shiny object with black enamel handles. I looked at myself again, trying to create one last impression.

I grabbed the scissors and, with my eyes closed, began to circle my head, clipping curls all the way around. I didn’t dare to look at the floor to see what had fallen. When I finished, I dropped the scissors, afraid to look at myself. Tears quietly flowed down my cheeks.

When I finally opened my eyes, I found Rusty and Don pointing at me and laughing hysterically. I couldn’t resist looking into the mirror. I choked up. There wasn’t a laugh in me. There in the mirror I caught sight of the haircut that was to make me famous in the 1920s. I laughed, then I cried, and I shuddered seeing all those curls lying on the floor and realizing that I had destroyed one of my mother’s few pleasures. . . .

My brother Shemp spotted me first. He let out a war whoop. “Take a look at your son with the fright wig. He thinks it’s Halloween, and what do you know, it’s not a wig; it’s a brand-new haircut.” Then Mother, Irving, and Jack came in. They stared speechless for a moment. Then Mother looked at me. I looked at her and the tears welled up in my eyes, then the tears welled up in hers. She said softly, “Thank God you did it. I didn’t have the courage.”

Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel offers a semi-fictional treatment of the same transition. The autobiographical novel by and about a boy born in 1900 in North Carolina says:

Eliza had allowed his hair to grow long; she wound it around her finger every morning into fat Fauntleroy curls: the agony and humiliation it caused him was horrible, but she was unable or unwilling to understand it, and mouth-pursingly thoughtful and stubborn to all solicitation to cut it.

And a few years and many pages later:

He was now in one of the upper grades of grammar school, he was one of the Big Boys. His hair had been cut when he was nine years old, after a bitter siege against Eliza’s obstinacy. He no longer suffered because of the curls.

TV Tropes lists many female examples of the Important Haircut in recent books, movies, and other entertainment. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, that passage was just as important for many boys.

“The Fauntleroy period had set in”

The hairstyle and costume popularized by Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy, as illustrated by Reginald B. Birch, didn’t remain fashionable for very long.

But it remained vivid in the memory of Americans who lived through the 1880s and ’90s. Indeed, that look for boys became an icon of the Gilded Age.

For instance, Booth Tarkington (1869–1946) published The Magnificent Ambersons in 1918. This passage, looking back on life in Indianapolis three decades before, describes Georgie Minafer as a boy:

…the Fauntleroy period had set in, and Georgie’s mother had so poor an eye for appropriate things, where Georgie was concerned, that she dressed him according to the doctrine of that school in boy decoration. Not only did he wear a silk sash, and silk stockings, and a broad lace collar, with his little black velvet suit: he had long brown curls, and often came home with burrs in them.

Except upon the surface (which was not his own work, but his mother’s) Georgie bore no vivid resemblance to the fabulous little Cedric. The storied boy’s famous “Lean on me, grandfather,” would have been difficult to imagine upon the lips of Georgie. A month after his ninth birthday anniversary, when the Major gave him his pony, he had already become acquainted with the toughest boys in various distant parts of the town, and had convinced them that the toughness of a rich little boy with long curls might be considered in many respects superior to their own. . . .

Thus, on a summer afternoon, a strange boy, sitting bored upon the gate-post of the Reverend Malloch Smith, beheld George Amberson Minafer rapidly approaching on his white pony, and was impelled by bitterness to shout: “Shoot the ole jackass! Look at the girly curls! Say, bub, where’d you steal your mother’s ole sash!”

“Your sister stole it for me!” Georgie instantly replied, checking the pony. “She stole it off our clo’es-line an’ gave it to me.”

“You go get your hair cut!” said the stranger hotly. “Yah! I haven’t got any sister!”

“I know you haven’t at home,” Georgie responded. “I mean the one that’s in jail.”

When Orson Welles adapted Tarkington’s novel into a movie, his script kept that deathless dialogue exactly. It also specified that that scene took place in 1885, thus slightly before Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel appeared. Bobby Cooper played young Georgie, as shown above.

Tarkington created another portrait of childhood in Penrod and its sequels, but he set those books a generation later, and none of the boys has Fauntleroy curls.

The Little Lord’s “Love-Locks”

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy started to appear in St. Nicholas Magazine in 1885, then came out in book form in 1886. It was illustrated by Reginald B. Birch.

Cedric, the title character, was defined by a distinctive look:

Mary…was proud of his graceful, strong little body and his pretty manners, and especially proud of the bright curly hair which waved over his forehead and fell in charming love-locks on his shoulders. She was willing to work early and late to help his mamma make his small suits and keep them in order.

“’Ristycratic, is it?” she would say. “Faith, an’ I’d loike to see the choild on Fifth Avey-NOO as looks loike him an’ shteps out as handsome as himself. An’ ivvery man, woman, and choild lookin’ afther him in his bit of a black velvet skirt made out of the misthress’s ould gownd; an’ his little head up, an’ his curly hair flyin’ an' shinin’. It’s loike a young lord he looks.”

Soon the name “Fauntleroy” was applied to the outfit Birch pictured. “Short tailored jacket, knee-length trousers, rather frilly shirt, wide collar with rounded corners, or large loose bow” is how Merriam Webster defines the adjective “Fauntleroy” now.

The long “love-locks on his shoulders” were just as much part of this look for upper-class boys. Indeed, within three years after Burnett’s story appearing, Harper’s Young People published an anecdote about “Little Rex, who is six years old, and has a pretty head of ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy’ curls.”

Soon there was a backlash. By 1893 the University of North Carolina Magazine started a positive review of Burnett’s new story collection with a nod to “the little Chapel Hill boy who wanted to cut off Lord Fauntleroy's curls and roll him in the dirt until he made of him a real boy.”

Pulled into the World of AI Language Models

The Atlantic Monthly just published a searchable listing of works uploaded to the LibGen collection of pirated writing.

I found two things I wrote in that database: my book The Road to Concord and a book review published in the New England Quarterly.

The LibGen collection is based on material that was digitally published in some protected format, such behind a journal’s paywall or under some a form of DRM.

That means my first book, never published in electronic form, wasn’t there. It also means the database lacks everything I’ve written for the web, including this blog, the Boston 1775 blog, many articles, and a 600-page National Park Service study, even though (or because) those texts aren’t protected at all.

LibGen is a shadowy operation, apparently centered in Russia, though it receives material from all over the world. In December, a consortium of global publishers sued and shut down access to many LibGen domains. A US court also ordered LibGen to pay $30 million, but there’s no identified owner or manager to hold personally responsible.

In his article accompanying the Atlantic database, Alex Reisner reported on how the Meta corporation used all or part of that database to train its AI language model. The company decided that legal options would take, well, money and time.

Back in 2023 Reisner reported on a smaller pirated collection of 180,000 books called Books3 used by multiple companies for the same purpose. In fact, piracy appears to be so embedded in AI language programs that last year KL3M announced it was “the first Legal Large Language Model.”

As the Authors Guild reports:

Legal action is already underway against Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, and other AI companies for using pirated books. If your book was used by Meta, you’re automatically included in the Kadrey v. Meta class action in Northern California without needing to take any immediate action. The court is first deciding whether Meta broke copyright laws, with a decision expected this summer, before officially certifying everyone as a class.

So I guess I’m involved in that lawsuit.

It seems clear to me that the LibGen operation breaks publishers’ legal licenses, in some cases to the detriment of royalty-earning authors. The downloading of that material by Meta and other corporations looks unethical, but I don’t know if any laws have been written that would make that act illegal.

Raskin Returns, the Sequel

As Publishers Weekly points out, there’s poetic irony in two previously unknown literary projects surfacing from the literary estate of Ellen Raskin, author of The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) and The Westing Game.

The industry organ reports:

International Literary Properties—a global company that invests in and manages literary estates—has acquired Raskin’s estate and, along with it, two previously unpublished manuscripts by the late author, including a sequel to her Newbery Award–winning mystery, The Westing Game. . . .

John Silbersack of the Bent Agency took on the role of Raskin’s literary agent nearly two decades ago, when Ellen’s daughter Susan Moore and son-in-law John first approached him to represent the estate. . . . Silbersack shared that at the time of Raskin’s death in 1984, “she had been working on—and had very nearly completed—a marvelous new story, very much in the vein of The Westing Game, titled A Murder for Macaroni and Cheese.

“Ellen’s practice was to rewrite and re-edit each prior chapter on the completion of a new chapter, so the earliest sections of the book were pored over time and again, while the very final chapters were more sketched out.” In an example of life imitating art, he said, “Ellen’s daughter, Susan, devoted herself to ‘solving’ the mystery and tying up all the loose ends, and the manuscript awaits a final polish and a worthy collaborator to bring it to a finale, which is at the top of our to-do list.”

Of the second book, a Westing Game sequel, he said, “Crafting a follow-up to one of the most beloved titles of all time is no small task. In conjunction with ILP, we’re currently in the process of bringing in another iconic middle grade author to work with us on this eagerly anticipated literary event. Watch this space!”

So in fact Ellen Raskin left two unfinished manuscripts, both needing considerable work by others to complete. A “global company” in now investing in those projects, seeking “a worthy collaborator” and “another iconic middle grade author” to make her notes publishable.

If Raskin told us anything, however, it’s to look beyond the surface. Back in 2012, Betsy Bird dug up a report from Publishers Weekly in 2007:

Stephanie Owens Lurie and Mark McVeigh at Dutton have acquired five books by Newbery Award–winner and The Westing Game author Ellen Raskin in a major six-figure deal negotiated by Alex Glass and John Silbersack at Trident on behalf of the Raskin estate. The books include two new puzzle mystery novels: The Westing Quest, a sequel to The Westing Game, and A Murder for Macaroni and Cheese, a never-before-seen manuscript nearly completed at the author’s death in 1984.

Bird then noted, “Years go by and not a peep is made about these books again.” Dutton reissued other Raskin titles in 2011. In the same year, the company announced A Murder for Macaroni and Cheese, issuing a brief blurb and an ISBN (9780525422914). But then that was pulled back.

The internet working as it does, lots of book websites (GoodReads, StoryGraph, Google Books, BooksWagon, etc.) sucked up the data attached to that ISBN and produced pages for A Murder for Macaroni and Cheese. So it already has the online profile of an out-of-print book when it’s never seen print at all.

Who Stepped into Buddy McDonald’s Shoes?

This is a footnote to my remarks on the short show-business career of Buddy McDonald.

I posited that because one day Buddy showed up for work from the small town of Bell, California, with no shoes, he became the Hal Roach Studios’ choice to play country boys.

In early 1935, a year and a half after the studio lost touch with Buddy, the Switzer family arrived at the Hal Roach Studios from little Paris, Illinois. Their sons, Harold and Carl Switzer, performed a musical act in the company café. Their number fit right into the current Our Gang short, “Beginner’s Luck” (IMDB; YouTube; Lucky Corner).

Harold’s face went blank when he focused on playing his mandolin. That led to the studio nickname “Deadpan” and very little to do in the movies, but he appeared as a background player and occasional stunt double for years.

In contrast, Carl Switzer had an expressive face (with no front teeth then) and an irrepressible personality. He got all the brothers’ lines and closeups in “Beginner’s Luck.” To secure him, the company offered both Switzers a long-term contract.

The studio reportedly debated what Carl’s character should be called, choosing “Alfalfa” over “Hayseed.” Either way, he was the gang’s new country boy.

At first Alfalfa dressed as a cowboy, wearing chaps and denim. (Only when he went to church in “Little Sinner” did he wear the undersized suit that later became his standard costume.)

Carl Switzer also played other roles that would once have gone to Buddy McDonald. In 1933 Charley Chase had made a comedy about visiting hillbilly country named “One of the Smiths,” with Buddy as a young hick.

Two years later, Chase returned to that rural setting in “Southern Exposure” (IMDB; YouTube). The script called for a little kid to deliver a telegram on muleback, and that became Carl Switzer’s second movie appearance.

In his 2001 interview with Richard W. Bann, Buddy McDonald recalled working with Chase:

He was a funny, funny man. His humor was droll. In one of the pictures, my line was, “Help! I swallowed twenty-five cents!”

He said, “You mean you swallowed a quarter?”

I said, “No, it was two dimes and a nickel.” I think he was playing a druggist.

That exchange doesn’t appear in any Chase short that I’ve found, so it may have ended up on the cutting room floor.

However, that routine does show up in the 1936 feature Kelly the Second, with Chase second-billed as a pharmacist. And the part of the jingly little boy was played by Carl Switzer.

The scene appears in this fan’s video, starting about 3:35 in. The jokes work, though they’re surprisingly scatalogical for the Hays Code.

The Strangeness of “Wiggle Your Ears”

“Wiggle Your Ears” (IMDB; YouTube; Lucky Corner) was a weird entry in the Our Gang series.

The storyline was not only adult, it was bleak.

Mary is infatuated with Harry because he can wiggle his ears. He treats her like dirt, making her crack his nuts and mend his pants. One line of Harry’s dialogue is even, “You got any money today, woman?”

Joe craves Mary’s attention, but he can’t wiggle his ears.

Pretty blonde Jean comes along. She also likes Harry’s ears, and Harry likes her. He doesn’t just toss Mary aside; he has her buy ice cream for him and Jean and then push them in his go-cart. Mary blubbers her woes through a donut. Farina advises her to doll herself up as a flapper.

Mary paints her cheeks and rolls down her stockings. But that “vamping” doesn’t work. Harry just takes her ring so he can marry Jean (shown in Mary’s imagination).

Meanwhile, Wheezer grudgingly helps his older brother Joe fake the feat of wiggling his ears with tape and string. (This was in fact how the Hal Roach Studios did the ear-wiggling trick.)

Mary becomes Joe’s girl, though that relationship is based on a lie. Harry’s ears get cramped as Jean makes him carry her doll and push her in the go-cart. The End.

Underscoring that bleak plot is how Robert F. McGowan shot nearly the whole movie in tight close-ups. So we get a clear view not only of the boys’ wiggling ears, but of Wheezer’s raspberries, Jean’s eye-batting, Harry’s underpants, and even a fly landing on Mary’s cheek. The result is almost Expressionist in its intensity.

In their book on the series, Leonard Maltin and Richard W. Bann wrote that “Wiggle Your Ears” is “an amusing but absolutely bizarre two-reeler.” The story spoofs adult relationships. There’s even an odd moment when Harry seems to be in orgasmic ecstasy while being licked by a cat. But as the kid actors play the situation straight, the close-up shots convey their emotions stronger than the parody.

At this time, several years into the Our Gang series, Bob McGowan was trying out unusual filmmaking techniques in various shorts. “Yale vs. Harvard” included lots of shots upward through glass. “The Spanking Age” cut all the adults’ heads out of the frame. “Cat, Dog & Co.” features a surreal dream sequence with giant chickens. “Wiggle Your Ears” is one of that set.

Some of those Our Gang pictures are lost. They weren’t released by Pathé, which produced additional 16mm prints for markets outside of cinemas. They didn’t have sound like the later MGM releases which got reproduced for television. And a fire at MGM in 1965 destroyed a lot of negatives. Thus, we can’t actually see how weird some of those late silent movies were. But we can see “Wiggle Your Ears.”

McGowan might have simply been in the mood to try something different. And a peek behind the scenes offers another reason for why “Wiggle Your Ears” was made as it was.

At the end of 1928, Hal Roach Studios was under pressure to finish all the shorts it had promised to MGM for the spring season before the place shut down for five weeks.

At the Laurel and Hardy unit, “Liberty” had taken more time than expected, so in one month they rushed through both “That’s My Wife” and “Big Business.” The former has a well-worn premise that hinges on pleasing a rich uncle (Our Gang’s “Baby Clothes” was one precursor). The latter took inspiration from the Christmas season and needed very little plot at all. 

For the Our Gang unit, the solution was overlapping productions, as recorded at the Lucky Corner website. Bob McGowan shot “Wiggle Your Ears” on a short schedule from 4 to 12 December. His nephew and namesake Robert A. McGowan, working as Anthony Mack, shot the very different movie “Fast Freight” (IMDB; YouTube; Lucky Corner) from 10 to 27 December.

By using a small cast, barely-glimpsed settings, and few group shots in “Wiggle Your Ears,” Bob McGowan could work with just two or three actors at a time, leaving others free to start their scenes for “Fast Freight.”

Thus, Allen “Sunny” Hoskins as Farina performed only two short scenes in “Wiggle Your Ears.” (As a black boy, he’s left out of the romantic maneuvers.) Pete the Pup appeared in only one. Neither filmed the final scene with the rest of the gang.

But Farina and Pete had extended scenes together riding the rails in “Fast Freight,” with no other cast members in sight. So while most of Our Gang were working with Bob McGowan on the streets of Culver City, Farina and Pete were probably off with Anthony Mack at the railyard.

Wisest Thing I’ve Read Today

From Katherine Rundell’s essay “Why Children’s Books?” in the London Review of Books:

It’s easier to trust a writer who writes great food: they are a person who has paid attention to the world. Children have very little control over what or when they eat, and evolution has given them a sweet tooth far stronger than an adult’s to ensure they consume enough calories during growth spurts – of course their longings are colossal. Fictional food provokes real hunger: it makes the story into a bodily thing. Food is a way to open the door to the space in which the capacity for imaginative and intellectual freedom is built: you lure them in with real appetites.

Perhaps the best book ever written about postwar rationing is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Published in 1964, ten years after rationing ended in Britain, it has an entire nation’s hunger for fresh tastes and wild luxury encoded in its pages.

And there is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, written in 1950, when sugar and fruit and treats were still scarce (in 1942, according to a survey, many children did not believe that bananas were real): Edmund’s Turkish Delight stands in for every lost and longed-for glory. What child forgets the seismically disappointing discovery that the English version tastes like jellied flowers dusted in soap powder?

“I just didn't know how to steer it”

By the spring of 1932, two years after Buddy McDonald first acted in an Our Gang movie, there had been some big changes at the Hal Roach Studio.

The Great Depression had caught up with the movie business. At the end of 1931, Bank of America set a new condition for renewing Roach’s credit: he had to hire Henry Ginsberg to supervise production and keep down costs.

Within the Our Gang unit, long-time players Allen “Farina” Hoskins, Mary Ann Jackson, and Norman “Chubby” Chaney all aged out in mid-1931. The next March, Bobby “Wheezer” Hutchins went off to make movies elsewhere for a while. The only cast members left from Buddy’s first three films were Dorothy DeBorba and Matthew “Stymie” Beard.

There were also two important additions to the gang. In spring 1932 the studio hired Dickie Moore, already established as a child actor, to play lead in the next several films. And from Texas the irrepressible George “Spanky” McFarland had stepped into Wheezer’s baby shoes as cute little brother and absolute chaos agent.

As a younger man producer-director Bob McGowan had been a firefighter, and he’d already applied that experience to two Our Gang movies: “Fire Fighters” (1922), the second to be filmed and released, and “The Fourth Alarm!” (1926).

To start a new slate of movies for fall 1932, McGowan remade “The Fourth Alarm!” with sound as “Hook and Ladder” (YouTube; IMDB; Lucky Corner). Dickie is the fire chief. Stymie is his right-hand man. Spanky is the wise-ass baby brother who can’t be left behind because he has to take his medicine every half-hour.

In “The Fourth Alarm!” there were a dozen gang members in the fire company. “Hook and Ladder” had eight—perhaps a sign of cost-cutting. And one of those kids was Buddy McDonald.

At this point, nine-year-old Buddy was the tallest in the gang (though not the oldest). He didn’t have any significant lines or close-ups. But he was tasked with driving a makeshift fire engine through the streets of Palms, California. Indeed, that job might have been why McGowan cast him again: the movie needed a kid big enough to handle a horse.

That didn’t go great. McDonald told Our Gang historian Richard D. Bann:

I was on the back of the hook and ladder trying to drive the thing and they had to pull me off of there. Don Sandstrom had to take over. I was supposed to steer from back there [behind the camera], but it was difficult for me and also a little dangerous. Scary, too. I allowed the contraption to get away from me, and it scared us all, so the assistant director took over. I just didn't know how to steer it. The thing wasn’t meant to swing side to side; I couldn’t keep it running straight. It must have looked funny because even after Don Sandstrom took over steering, it continued swaying back and forth. This time on purpose. I was lucky I didn’t kill somebody on the city streets!

At least Buddy didn’t have to work with goats again.

That was Buddy McDonald’s last film, from Hal Roach or any other studio. He stayed in show biz, singing on the Juvenile Revue radio show, which started in 1933. His photo appeared in the 30 Aug 1933 Los Angeles Herald-Examiner as a member of the cast of the radio soap opera Molly Malone’s Family, produced by star Edith Greaves. McDonald recalled doing that job “every afternoon when I wasn’t at Hal Roach Studios.”

But late in 1933 Buddy’s parents blew up his career:

Then my parents separated and my mom grabbed we three kids—my older brother, my younger brother, and myself—and we went to Oregon. She had an aunt up there she thought would take us in. All the aunt did was point to the berry field. “Go help yourself,” was her advice. We lived in a tent, slept on the ground, picking and eating berries and fruit to live. We were fruit tramps. In time we scraped together enough money to get back to Southern California and return to our same house.

That was “About a year later.”

With the money I’d earned in pictures and radio, my parents had been able to pay off the house. In those days a nice, four bedroom house in the town of Bell was something you could have bought for around $800 to $1,200. While we had been tramping up in Oregon, my dad told us—before he left—that Hal Roach Studios called six to eight times looking for me to do more picture work. Then that finally stopped. . . .

During the Prohibition era in this country, my dad had a cafe on Florence Avenue, and he was bootlegging out the back door. When Prohibition was repealed [December 1933] he turned the place into a bar and then he got a liquor license for a second operation in Bell. Trouble was, he and my mother were their own best customers.

The McDonalds divorced. Buddy started drinking himself, then committing petty crimes. He went to a high school for “incorrigible boys,” served in the US Marines in the war, and did a stint in jail for armed robbery.

In 1953, Bud McDonald joined Alcoholics Anonymous and started living sober. He helped to raise a family and to run a trucking business. He founded programs to help addicts.

After his talk to Bann in 2001, McDonald was invited to some Los Angeles gatherings of the Sons of the Desert, the society founded to celebrate Laurel and Hardy, which had also adopted Our Gang and other Hal Roach series. Thomas “Bud” McDonald died in 2008, a couple of weeks short of turning eighty-six and more than three-quarters of a century after his last ride with Our Gang.

(This is the end of an analysis of Bann’s interview with McDonald, considered through other sources about the Our Gang movies, that started with these posts:

• When Buddy McDonald Arrived in the Neighborhood
• “Trying to figure out what kind of a kid they had”
• “They want boys like Farina”
• “One day I showed up at the studio barefoot”
• Buddy McDonald Dropped from the Gang)

Buddy McDonald Dropped from the Gang

In this posting, I posited that while working on the Our Gang comedy “School’s Out” (IMDB; Lucky Corner) in June 1930, seven-year-old Buddy McDonald showed up one day without any shoes.

Speaking in 2001 to Richard W. Bann, McDonald recalled: “my mother never noticed. She had to drive all the way back to Bell to get my shoes, and in the meantime they went and bought a new pair of shoes for me at the studio.”

I wonder if there was more fallout from that day. Buddy’s mother wasn’t always easy to get along with. He told Bann frankly:

My parents were both “lushes.” . . . My mother was a violent drunk and my father was a passive drunk. My mom could start a fight in an empty room when she was drunk. . . . My brothers and I would try to disappear if my mother was drinking, because we were scared to death of her.

There’s no hint that alcohol was involved in this particular incident, but it may have convinced the studio that the McDonalds weren’t reliable, or worth the trouble.

I suggest that because after “School’s Out,” Buddy McDonald disappeared from the gang. He didn’t appear in any of the four Our Gang movies filmed in the rest of 1930—not even “Love Business” (YouTube; IMDB; Lucky Corner) which was a sequel to “Teacher’s Pet” and “School’s Out.”

The studio had its pick of freckled boys in that period. In addition to Buddy, there were Donald Haines and Douglas Greer. In fact, all three appeared in “School’s Out” (which needed a big cast of schoolmates), and all three played boys nicknamed “Speck” in 1930–32.

At the end of 1930 Paramount hired Jackie Cooper away to star in Skippy. Donald Haines played Harley Nubbins in that film, and Buddy McDonald appeared in the background. By McDonald’s account, he also appeared in the sequel, Sooky. Jackie went on to an Oscar nomination and more starring roles as an MGM contract player. Donald returned to the Our Gang series by May 1931.

In contrast, Buddy was called in to the Hal Roach Studio only sporadically. His work consisted of:

• Sometime in late 1930, a small part in the Laurel and Hardy feature Pardon Us, later cut from the movie.
• February–March 1931, the Charley Chase short “One of the Smiths,” as discussed before.
• October 1931, the Thelma Todd–Zasu Pitts short “On the Loose” (YouTube; IMDB; Dave Lord Heath), directed by Hal Roach himself.
• November 1931, another Todd–Pitts short, “Sealskins” (IMDB; Dave Lord Heath), as an office boy.

Meanwhile, the Our Gang unit made eight movies in 1931, none with Buddy.

It‘s clear from the Bann interview that Buddy McDonald really enjoyed his days at the Roach studio. He talked about the fun of watching other movies being made. He spoke about Our Gang producer-director Bob McGowan as “a very kind, sweet old man.”

Some people at the studio seem to have paid particular attention to Buddy. He named Jack Roach, the studio chief’s brother and administrator: “I was sort of a pet of his, and got to spend time with him, even in his office.” And Oliver Hardy: “He liked me. He would swing me up and I could ride around on his shoulders.”

One possible scenario is that folks at the Roach Studio realized that Buddy McDonald was a smart, willing kid from a troubled family. McGowan, who was known for keeping parents at a distance, chose to stop casting him. But other people at the studio showed him kindness and gave him small roles. For “On the Loose,” he even got the run of the Venice Pier amusement park for a few days.

COMING UP: One last ride on the fire engine.

“One day I showed up at the studio barefoot”

In his 2001 interview with Richard W. Bann, Bud McDonald shared one memory from working at the Hal Roach Studio at age seven:

We were supposed to work out at the ranch on an Our Gang. Down home, in the summer time, I went barefoot, like everyone else. . . . One day I showed up at the studio barefoot. I didn’t put any shoes on and my mother never noticed. She had to drive all the way back to Bell to get my shoes, and in the meantime they went and bought a new pair of shoes for me at the studio. They had to scuff ’em up real bad.

Movies from the 1920s confirm that it wasn’t unusual for southern California boys to go barefoot. Coy Watson, Jr., didn’t wear shoes while starring in “A Nick-of-Time Hero” (1921) or playing a newsboy in “Galloping Bungalows” (1924). Neither did some players in the earliest Century Kids comedies and later Mickey McGuire movies.

More often, however, it’s ordinary kids called in as extras or hanging around in backgrounds who are shoeless. In the Our Gang movie “Big Business” (filmed September 1923, released 1924; Lucky Corner; YouTube), every anonymous walk-on is barefoot. One special example is the early Laurel and Hardy and James Finlayson short “Sugar Daddies” (1927; YouTube; Dave Lord Heath): a little fellow in overalls is so curious about what the comedians are doing on the Venice Pier that he pads alongside them staring for twenty seconds.

The Lucky Corner website reports that Buddy McDonald’s first three Our Gang movies were filmed on this schedule:

• “Pups Is Pups” April–May 1930
• “Teacher’s Pet” May 1930
• “School’s Out” June 1930

Since McDonald referred to his shoeless arrival as happening “in the summer time,” that was most likely during the June shooting of “School’s Out.” That short was a sequel to “Teacher’s Pet,” with Jackie Cooper still mooning over teacher Miss Crabtree. Buddy was once again in the core group of school kids, though he didn’t have as many lines or close-ups as in the previous movie.

I suspect that the shoes incident affected how people at the Hal Roach Studio perceived Buddy McDonald. To begin with, he appears to have become the studio’s choice to play barefoot country boys.

Sometime later that year, Buddy and occasional Our Gang member Bobby Mallon shot a scene for the Laurel and Hardy’s first feature Pardon Us (Dave Lord Heath). That movie grew from a short subject as the studio kept adding episodes over several months, and I can’t tell when this scene was filmed.

Buddy and Bobby played two kids in overalls and straw hats, fishing and listening to Stan and Ollie discuss their criminal past. Ultimately that scene was cut from the English-language picture, but it survives in the treatment, this one publicity photo, and possibly the German print.

Buddy’s next release for Roach, filmed in February–March 1931, was the Charley Chase comedy “One of the Smiths” (YouTube; IMDB; Dave Lord Heath). He played a hillbilly kid, as shown at top. Though this character doesn’t have lines, his actions are crucial to the plot.

(McDonald also recalled a line he delivered in another Charley Chase movie, with Chase perhaps playing a druggist, but no one’s found that footage. It’s therefore possible Buddy filmed that scene before “One of the Smiths,” but I’m guessing not.)

COMING UP: Another effect of Buddy’s barefoot arrival may not have been so positive.

“They want boys like Farina”

As I wrote before, the 1930 Our Gang short “Pups Is Pups” (Lucky Corner; IMDB; Dave Lord Heath) was set in a city, with big industrial structures looming over the kids’ yard.

That setting was also reflected in the gang itself, which was more multiethnic than it had been since 1925. That was when George “Sonny Boy” Warde made the last of his nine movies playing a stereotypical Chinese kid. For “Pups Is Pups” the gang included Alan Dong in a similar role, never repeated.

Of course, like all the Our Gang films, “Pups Is Pups” included some African-American kids: Allen “Farina” Hoskins; his sister Jannie, as shown in a still from a deleted scene; and young twins Kenneth and Hugo Hill playing his little brothers. (In the next movie, Matthew Beard arrived as a little brother for Farina. At first called Hercules, he’d soon be nicknamed “Stymie.”)

“Pups Is Pups” was also the first movie for Buddy McDonald, whose 2001 interview with Richard W. Bann I’ve been studying. Having a racially integrated set of playmates was new to Buddy, but he enjoyed working with Farina and Stymie:

I really liked them, both. They were the very first black people I met. I thought nothing of it at the time. I did learn about racial prejudice, but not at Hal Roach Studios. My mother was a bigot. . . .

Farina was the only one I stayed in touch with. We were pretty good friends. I talked to Al Hoskins around the year he died. He was back and forth between Oakland and Los Angeles. He’d been down and out too. He seemed to have nothing left either from his days in the Gang, other than memories. But it didn’t defeat his optimism. What a nice man.

In that interview, McDonald drew Bann’s attention to a part of Farina’s costuming imposed to make him fit the prevailing stereotype of black kids:

watch the films with Farina. He had another pair of shoes on inside those big shoes he wore to make his feet look extra large.

The 1925 promotional film “Our Gang at Home” makes the difference obvious. That movie is included in Ben Model’s Silent Comedy Watch Party, episode 88. Watch from 45:30 to 46:10, when little Farina briefly gets to wear only his own shoes.

“Pups Is Pups” played off American racial attitudes in another way that Bann’s interview didn’t address. Early in the movie, Farina reads an advertisement seeking “colored boys” to be pages at a dog and pet show. Jackie proposes the whole gang seek jobs as pages, but Chubby says, “They want boys like Farina.” There’s no explanation of what that means, but probably no explanation was necessary. Farina heads downtown to earn good money, promising that once he lands the job he’ll get the gang prizes for their pets.

As I mentioned above, one publicity photo shows a scene that never made it into the final cut. Apparently the original script showed all the other neighborhood kids of Farina’s age in blackface, presumably to apply for page jobs. That group includes (from left) Jackie, Chubby, Mary Ann, Buddy McDonald, and Alan Dong.

Bann didn’t ask McDonald about being made up for this scene or how it played out, and McDonald didn’t bring it up. But I have to think it was a unusual, memorable experience for a new actor.

The book Hollywood Speaks quoted Hal Roach this way: “I’d say fifty percent of written comedy won’t play. Things sound funny on paper, but when you get on the set, they may not be funny.” The studio relied on improvisation, and many planned or even performed scenes were never released.

In this case, the original plan for “Pups Is Pups” must not have played. Director Robert McGowan pulled back into familiar territory of kids and animals pushing into a dignified adult setting. (Chaos and hilarity ensued, of course.)

(NEXT: “One Day I showed up at the studio barefoot.”)

“Trying to figure out what kind of a kid they had”

As recounted back here, Buddy McDonald joined the Our Gang troupe in 1930 at the age of seven.

He lived in the Los Angeles suburb of Bell. Now in the heart of Los Angeles County, that city was only three years old back in 1930. It had a population just under 8,000, though that was enough to justify its own local newspaper.

Culver City, home of the Hal Roach Studio and MGM, was twenty-eight miles away.

In his 2001 interview with Richard W. Bann, McDonald explained that his journey into the movies started with being “the champion speller for the Los Angeles city schools for my grade.” His parents, “drunk on a Sunday night,” sent a newspaper clipping about this feat to the company that made the Our Gang movies.

I think they mailed it to Hal Roach on a Monday, and on Wednesday the studio called our next door neighbor—because we didn't have a phone. They wanted me out there that Thursday.

So the next day, after school, we went all the way over to Washington Boulevard in Culver City to find this place, Hal Roach Studios. It was quite a drive on the roads in those days. We saw Bob McGowan, and Hal Roach. They sort of interviewed me. But very low key. I didn’t quite know what this was about and what my parents were doing with me. . . .

Looking back on it, they were trying to figure out what kind of a kid they had. What could I do? They talked with me, I had to make a few faces, sing a song, recite a poem; they filmed it. They developed the test, almost immediately. Took practically no time. They determined I was photogenic, and told me to report back to the studio the next day, Friday, to begin work on my first picture

Many of the first long-lasting Our Gang cast came from the Hal Roach Studio community: Ernie Morrison, already under contract; Mary Kornman, daughter of a still photographer; her friend and neighbor, Mickey Daniels, who was also a nephew of Harold Lloyd’s former leading lady Bebe Daniels; Jack Davis, younger brother of Lloyd’s current leading lady and then wife.

By the early 1930s, the studio was taking on kids with show-biz experience. Jackie Cooper’s mother was in vaudeville. Mary Ann Jackson, Harry Spear, Donald Haines, and Kendall McComas were regulars in other film series before joining Roach. 

But McDonald was just a kid from LA County. “I lived in Bell, and it was such a small community, I was the one and only person who had anything to do with the movies. It made me famous, at least there! If I sneezed, it was news. In Bell, that is.”

Buddy’s first movie was “Pups Is Pups,” filmed in April. His character was just a neighborhood kid with a pet goat, and the goat got better camera angles. I don’t think he had any lines. “They handed me a toothbrush and told me to brush the goat’s teeth,” McDonald recalled. “I was scared to death of that god-damned goat. I had never been around a goat, and it really frightened me.”

Presumably director Robert McGowan wanted to start Buddy slowly. But he learned fast. In his second movie, “Teacher’s Pet,” Buddy not only had lines, he was one of star Jackie Cooper’s three main friends, alongside established players Farina and Chubby. The studio managers didn’t give Buddy an elaborate costume or have him pose in publicity photos like the long-time cast, but clearly they saw potential in him.

(NEXT: “They want boys like Farina.”)

Two More Oziana Short Stories

Last week’s posting about a mystery story in Oziana 2024 made me realize I’d never noted Oziana 2023, which contains two of my stories.

As I reported last week, I’ve been seeking inspiration for new stories from pairing two recurring characters in the Oz books, as L. Frank Baum did in his Little Wizard Stories of Oz.

“The Soldier with the Green Whiskers and the Guardian of the Gates” is a natural pairing: two officers of the Wizard’s Emerald City government who kept their posts under the Scarecrow and then Princess Ozma, working together as friends.

The Oziana 2023 stories, in contrast, pair characters who have little in common and start out at odds with each other.

“Button-Bright and the Professor” shows the small boy from Philadelphia and the highly educated Wogglebug quarreling over directions before they’re forced to deal with a giant riddle-loving pangolin. This story was illustrated by Marcus Mébes.

“Glinda and the Glass Cat” follows the transparent feline to the China Country, the Hammerheads, and the Fighting Trees while the powerful sorceress seeks to make her curb her willful instincts. Anna-Maria Cool supplied fun art for this tale, and for the magazine’s cover.

Like other recent issues of Oziana magazine, the 2023 collection is sold through Lulu.

A Mystery Tale from the Early Emerald City

Oziana is the International Wizard of Oz Club’s creative magazine for fiction and art inspired by the Oz books. It’s been published annually for about half a century now.

The latest issue, printed at the end of last year, includes my short story “The Soldier with the Green Whiskers and the Guardian of the Gates,” delightfully illustrated by Rob Lauer.

This story is set shortly after the end of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The Wizard has flown away, leaving the Emerald City under the rule of the now-brainy Scarecrow. And then the Scarecrow departed to escort his friend Dorothy to the castle of Glinda the Good. So the soldier and the guardian are the highest-ranking officials in town when Winged Monkeys start tearing a hole in the city wall.

I wrote the first version of this story when I was in junior high or high school, but was never fully satisfied with it. A few years ago I realized that it fit into a couple of trends in my newer Oz writing:

• It was a mystery, and could be a better one.
• It paired two recurring characters, a form L. Frank Baum used in his Little Wizard Stories of Oz and which I’ve been using to springboard other tales.

I wrote the story again from scratch, hopefully better. At the time I didn’t have a copy of the first version. Since then I came across an old photocopy, but I haven’t dared to read it, lest it be so much worse or even a tiny bit better.

If you care to read “The Soldier with the Green Whiskers and the Guardian of the Gates,” plus six more stories about the early history of Oz, all illustrated, and a closing poem, please order Oziana 2024 from Lulu.

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.

(This is the start of an analysis of Bann’s interview with McDonald, considered through other sources about the Our Gang movies, that continues with these posts:

• “Trying to figure out what kind of a kid they had”
• “They want boys like Farina”
• “One day I showed up at the studio barefoot”
• Buddy McDonald Dropped from the Gang
• “I just didn't know how to steer it”)

Bonedust and a Jug of Molasses

“Helping Grandma” (YouTube; IMDB; Lucky Corner) was an Our Gang comedy filmed in the summer of 1930 and released in January 1931.

Borrowing a situation from the very first movie shot for the series, titled “Our Gang,” it shows the kids helping out at a general store.

That series pilot from 1922 may not be the only source for this comedy, however.

“Helping Grandma” starts with a kid nicknamed “Bonedust,” played by Bobby Young (1917–1951; as an adult actor he went by Clifton Young).

Bonedust started to appear in the Our Gang series in 1925, sometimes in the gang and sometimes just in the neighborhood. When his character had any distinction, it was usually defined by haplessness.

Pretty soon Bobby Young grew too tall to fit in with the gang (his adult height was 6'1"). He stopped being a semi-regular in 1928. But in 1930 he came back to play occasional roles, now gawky as well as hapless, in a few talkies. Among those was “Helping Grandma.”

As this short starts, Bonedust is a customer at the store. Jackie Cooper fills a jug with molasses for him. But when it comes time to pay, Bonedust says, “Doggone it, Jack, the money’s in the jug.”

Jackie tells Bonedust, “That was an old gag when my mother was a kid. You come across with that dough or I’ll pop you in the chin!”

Since Jackie Cooper’s head didn’t come up to Bobby Young’s shoulders (as shown above), this doesn’t look like a feasible solution. But Bonedust is too ineffectual to just push his way through the little kids.

Grandma (Margaret Mann) comes over and asks “Robert” if his dime really is in the jug. Bonedust says it is. So she charges the molasses to his family and sends him off.

Jack’s not happy. “Gee whiz, Grandma! Don’t you know that guy’s gypping us?”

“I know, dear Jack,” says Grandma. “But do you remember, you got a quarter’s worth of molasses out of me that same way once.”

Jack gulps. “I was afraid you’d remember that. Well, we all have our weak moments. But that guy is permanent!”

The next scene shows Bonedust at home pouring molasses out of the jug into a pan and then retrieving his dime from the goop. So he was too hapless to lie.

That opening for “Helping Grandma” establishes Grandma’s character and the moral of the movie. But the way it presents the situation of claiming a coin was in the molasses container suggests that really was an “old gag,” a small trick that more than a few boys tried on storekeepers. And there is a notable precedent in Hollywood comedy.

Back in 1917, Buster Keaton made his first film as a supporting player for Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle in “The Butcher Boy” (YouTube; IMDB). In his autobiography, My Wonderful World of Slapstick, Buster Keaton explained the set-up this way:

The plot called for me to buy a quarter’s worth of molasses. I had brought along a tin pail for the molasses. But after it was ladled out I discovered that I had dropped the quarter into the molasses. Roscoe, Al St. John, and myself all took turns at trying to get the quarter.

That’s not exactly how the situation plays out. Fatty pours the molasses into Buster’s porkpie hat to retrieve the coin, leading to sticky situations and messy fights. Lea Stans provided a thorough analysis of this scene at Silent-ology. In the 1950s Keaton performed variations on the same skit for television shows like You Asked for It.

But “The Butcher Boy” is the only earlier appearance of this situation I’ve been able to find. Keaton didn’t suggest that this business came from a vaudeville sketch or well-known joke. I’ve searched Google Books and Early American Newspapers for anecdotes about molasses and coins and tricky boys, and I haven’t found any.

Perhaps better research will turn up examples, but for now it looks like what Jackie Cooper called an “old gag” in 1930 was a sort of homage to a movie made in 1917, the same year Bobby “Bonedust” Young was born.