Heck yeah, Hal Roach!

smiles all around for the cast of Hal Roach’s comedy series, The Boy Friends

Mildred Kornman, one of the original members of Hal Roach’s Our Gang, meets her successor, little Dorothy de Borba.  It wasn’t so long ago that the lovely Miss Kornman was a littler girl like Dorothy, who now plays in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer comedies

Oliver Hardy, January 18, 1892 - August 7, 1957.

Born Today, January 18 in 1892 Oliver Hardy…

“Well, here’s a another nice mess you’ve gotten me into!” - as Ollie in Another Fine Mess :) 

Image: Mary Ann Jackson, Alan “Farina” Hoskins, Joe Cobb, Harry Spear, Jean Darling and Bobby “Wheezer” Hutchins in a 1929 Our Gang comedy, later to be known as The Little Rascals. (CBS via Getty Images) y

The kids in the Our Gang comedies, also known as The Little Rascals, enjoyed as long a run on screen as anyone, starting in 1922. The child actors would age out of the comedies, and they’d be replaced. But there was this constant: While most of the gang were white, there was always at least one black child in the cast. Author Julia Lee dug deep into the lives of the African-American actors who performed in Our Gang, and she’s written a book about them called Our Gang: A Racial History Of The Little Rascals.

Billie “Buckwheat” Thomas (1931-1980)

African American child actor that played the character of Buckwheat in the Our Gang (Little Rascals) short films from 1934 until the series’ end in 1944. Although the character he played was often the subject of controversy in later years for containing elements of the “pickaninny” stereotype, Thomas always defended his work in the series, pointing out that Buckwheat and the rest of the black Our Gang kids were treated as equals to the white kids in the series. He was a native of Los Angeles, California.

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Laurel and Hardy dance on a skyscraper beam from the 1929 film Liberty.

Shot on roof of the then Home of Western Costume Supplies Building that overlooks 939 South Broadway in Los Angeles. Film Buffs will recognize it as the same backdrop for the Harold Lloyd Film called Safety Last which thrilled audiences 6 years earlier with Lloyd seemingly barely hanging onto a breaking clock face.

The positioning of the building against a hilly side of LA makes the vertical drop seem like 40-50 stories while in fact the set is built on the roof 20 feet in the air. Still it is noted that all the actors there did face peril at certain times as they were near edges of actual buildings despite precautions. Stan Laurel was pretty terrified of the construction of the skyscraper set and it didn’t help that Oliver Hardy tried to demonstrate the safety of it by jumping on a fake I-beam from above, which cracked and sent Hardy falling into the safety net below.

Perfect Day (1929)