We’re just launching right into this, aren’t we? Billy Laughlin was a child actor whose character on our Gang spoke in a guttural voice, like a frog’s. Because the rest of the gang…did not fair so well… Froggy was Killed by a Truck While Delivering Newspapers at the Age of 16 It might seem like we’re stretching that last “success story” but, honestly, given the fates that befell so many of the Little Rascals, making it to 89 is a damn impressive feat. And Sidnesy Kibrick, who played Woim for a few years, is…alive at the age of 89? Like, he didn’t really do anything Wikipedia-worthy after his brief stint as a child actor, but he’s still alive and well. Mildred Kornman, still alive and kicking at 92, was a successful fashion model who went under the name Rikci VanDusen. Jackie Cooper, who appeared in some early Our Gang films, was the youngest actor at the time to be nominated for an Oscar (at the age of 9) and had a long, lucrative film career. Of the large, revolving cast, there were some success stories. Like, we know that’s a bare minimum for just being basically decent humans, but in the 1920s it wasn’t a given that you were going to be dealing with basically decent humans. The Gang films were notable for a few reasons-they were some of the first movies that showed innocent “kid being kids” antics that actually seemed like something you’d see in real life.Īnd they were also surprisingly racially tolerant, with black and white characters interacting as friends and equals. Of the two, his work on Our Gang came first, but also was the most haunted. Hal Roach produced two smash hits in his time- Our Gang and Laurel and Hardy.

(Yes they fucking were.) The Original Little Rascals Cast Was Probably Cursed? Was the original Little Rascals cast cursed? We excluded things like overdoses and people who got heart attacks in their 50s because, well, we just don’t want to write a bunch of jokes about that kind of stuff today.īut we’ll leave it to you once you’ve seen the evidence. To prove so, we’re going to talk about the early, non-natural demises of original cast members in what promises to be our most depressing article yet. Sure, snopes has weighed in on this to preemptively tell us we’re wrong. But when we started looking into the actors who played iconic characters such as Spanky and Buckwheat and Alfalfa, we discovered something a little…perturbing. They remain such an important cultural touchstone that we even decided to revisit the characters in a 1994 motion picture (which, like, did only okay). From 1922 through 1944, the franchise, which you may know better as The Little Rascals, put out 220 short films and one film, featuring 41 child actors during that span. Our Gang helped define an entire era of early Hollywood entertainment. ~AFFotD Editor-in-Chief, Johnny Roosevelt “Okay guys, I don’t know who decided to write this article, but I’ve doubled our whiskey rations for it.

The cast of the original little rascals