“We went back and figured out what we would do for a beginning”

After “The Big Show!” and “The Cobbler,” the next Our Gang production was Bob McGowan’s “The Champeen!”

As Rob DeMoss explains on the Lucky Corner website, it’s not clear when in September 1922 or so that short was filmed. The two preceding films both had an unusually high number of shooting days, and the studio records don’t assign any days to “The Champeen!” at all. DeMoss posits there was a bookkeeping error.

Watching for the splint that Jackie Condon started wearing after his 8 August fall offers hints to how “The Champeen!” was created. And the recent ClassicFlix restoration of that short (which can be viewed here) provides clear pictures.

During that movie’s climactic boxing scene, Jackie serves as timekeeper for the match. He rings the bell with his left hand. A bit of the splint can be seen poking out of his right sleeve, as shown above.

Likewise, in his first appearance in this short, appearing to drive a car, Jackie has the splint on his right forearm while his left forearm is bare. So that footage was also shot while he was still recovering—but he seems more dexterous.

About a quarter of the way through these two reels, Jackie has a scene with Jack Davis. In some shots he appears still to be wearing the splint, even as he uses his right arm to knock a pastry out of Jack’s hands. But in the shots when Jack pummels the smaller boy, as shown here, Jackie’s forearms are both bare. Apparently his arm had healed by then (and a good thing, too).

Those glimpses suggest that McGowan filmed the fight scene in “The Champeen!” first. In the same way, Harold Lloyd, the biggest star working on the Hal Roach Studios lot in 1923, shot the big climbing sequence in Safety Last, then worked backwards to motivate that action.

“We didn't know what we were going to have for the beginning of it,“ Lloyd said in a 1966 interview; “after we found that we had, in our opinion, a very, very good thrill sequence,…we went back and figured out what we would do for a beginning, and then worked on up to what we already had.”

For “The Champeen!” McGowan appears to have created a funny boxing scene for the climax but needed a motivation for Jack Davis and Mickey Daniels to fight. Rivalry for Mary Kornman offered a reason. The final scenario has her first set those two boys against each other by asking Mickey to chastise Jack for pummeling her little brother—Jackie. But that scene wasn’t shot till after the big finish.

Indeed, on reflection Jackie Condon’s role at the end of “The Champeen!” doesn’t fit with his scenes before. He goes from being part of the beef between the two boxers to being a neutral timekeeper. Though Mary is introduced as his big sister, there’s no connection between them in the final scene. Not that I thought about those discrepancies until now.