Rant #3,613: I'd Like To Get To Know You (Again)

I was having a conversation with a woman at my son's basketball.league on Friday night, and we were talking about the current state of television.

The last thing she said to me about this was, "There is a lot of garbage on TV right now," and I really couldn't agree with her more.

There are plenty of choices, but personally, I simply cannot get into any of them.

And with so much of what they call "entertainment" literally infested with Hollywood woke nonsense, really, when I want to be entertained, I generally do not like being spoken down to by multimillionaires who think they know better than average Joe's do.

And that goes triple for the movies, which aren't worth the price of admission.

I don't really watch much TV anymore, except for the news shows--local and national--and sports (I have Verizon, so st least right now, I don't have any carriage issues).

So what does a guy like me do when he wants to watch TV and there is literally nothing on to watch?

One of these abysses is during the week at 7:30 p.m., after the news shows are over and right before the abysmal prime-time schedule rears its head.

So what do my wife and I watch at 7:30 p.m. during the week?

We mix old and new into one package by watching the Our Gang/Little Rascals series, from beginning to end.

We started watching the series--which spanned the silent era in the early 1920s to the war era of the early 1940s--and produced about 220 episodes, or short features ranging from 10 minutes to 30 minutes in length.

The series--the brain child of controversial filmmaker Hal Roach--also spawned a few legitimate spinoffs, some not-so-legitimate ones, and really is the bellwether of how children are featured on TV and in the movies.

Yes, the series is very controversial--some of its imagery related to blacks is very questionable--but it was perhaps the first entertainment series to show the races on somewhat equal footing.

Anyway, I found that each of the episodes--including the silent ones--are available all around the Internet, and when we want to watch one of these shorts--which were originally shown in movie theaters but migrated to TV in the early 1950s--I simply cast it to my TV, and we have some legitimate viewing to keep us entertained.

Now before you say, "You must have seen each of these shorts 1,000 times," think again.

First of all, even in the 1950s and 1960s, many of these shorts were sheared of their more controversial elements--believe it or not, not just related to its depiction of blacks, but also of Asians, Jews and the mentally ill--so oftentimes we are seeing these shorts intact for the very first time.

And some were banned entirely from TV, so it's the first time my wife and I have seen these shorts either in decades or ever.

Second, the shorts are pretty much divided into three packages, and viewers pretty much only saw the second package way back when.

The first package featured only the silent episodes--starring Joe Cobb, Mickey Daniels and a few others who migrated to the talkies in the early 1930s--and I know that on New York TV, these were rarely televised.

The second package features the most well- known and televised shorts in the series, featuring Chubby Chaney, Farina Hoskins. Jackie Cooper and Stimey Beard, and later, Spanky McFsrland, Alfalfa Switzer, Buckwheat Thomas, Butch Bond, Porky Lee and Darla Hood.

The third package is the generally highly inferior and rarely shown MGM shorts, initially featuring Spanky, Alfalfa, Butch, Porky, Darla and Buckwheat and later adding Froggy Laughlin and Mickey Gubitosi, aka Robert Blake.

So, as you can see, a major chunk of these shorts have either not been seen by my wife and I or maybe we have seen some of them once or twice.

Anyway, watching these shorts gives us a good, short education each evening on not just Hollywood during those 20 years, but American life in general during those years.

Many are poignant, heartfelt vignettes of the time, others are as full of slapstick as the Three Stooges shorts are, and some of the later ones are morality plays or are firmly geared to the war effort.

And yes, we laugh, we giggle, we often grimace, and we take it all in. I mean, some of these shorts are nearing 100 years old!

(As an aside, I met Spanky about 35 years ago or so, and he was as engaging in person as he was on screen.)

Since we began watching these shorts in December, we are now approaching the end of the series. I have seen the last two episodes in the past, and while they are pretty bad, I look forward to seeing them again.

We need to watch a couple of the silents, and then we can watch the legitimate spinoffs, including "General Spanky," a feature-length film that incredibly, actually stars Buckwheat!

There are a couple of other spinoffs to watch--Hal Roach tried to start the series up again in the late 1940s with two hour-long features with a completely different set of kid characters, and there was also "The Boyfriends," series of short films featuring the early Gang members as teens--and if we really want to stretch it, we can watch the rip-off Mickey McGuire series ... which is godawful, but brought the world Mickey Rooney and Shirley Temple.

And if you think this is all too old hat for you, let me add that right before Christmas, there was a brand new, 400-page biography released on Alfalfa! It is a bit pricey, but when the cost comes down, I will probably get it

So the interest in the series remains as high as it always has been.

Anyway, that is what my wife and I watch each night ... and you can probably hear us laughing wherever you are if you try.

Thus is REAL entertainment, not the trash we are being fed by Hollywood today.

"Chubsy Ubsy" indeed!