Long Lost Our Gang (Little Rascals) Film Now Available

Here is the long lost Our Gang film "The Old Wallop" from 1927. Transferred from a very rare vintage French print of the film, and restored with recreated English titles. This is the first time the film has been seen publicly in many decades. Enjoy!

 

Thank you for sharing the news and the posted clip available!

 

Great stuff, thanks!

 

thanks for sharing...I loved it!

 

I love the silent Our Gangs, glad I got to see this one!

 

Great to see this! Thanks!

 

What is the most common explanation given for the loss of these films? To the best of my knowledge, hundreds of copies would have been playing simultaneously across theatres in the US and abroad. I can't for the life of me fathom how they could be "lost". Original negatives, absolutely, but copies actually shown in theatres just doesn't make sense to this 49 year old

 

Thanks for the bump, I missed it the first time around!

 

assuming the copies were on nitrate stock, I'd say they disintegrated to mush over the last 90 some years.

 

Truth be told, I have found "The Old Wallop" film reels on Ebay at least 3 times in the past 10 years. They never sell for much simply because the French title of the film isn't common knowledge.

 

“Now you children eat your mush! Aaaaaah!!!”

 

Most of the lost Our Gang films were the ones released by MGM.

MGM owned its own theaters, which meant films that had finished their runs would have likely been returned.

In 1965, a vault fire at MGM destroyed thousands of early films, including the negatives to the silent Roach/MGM Our Gang shorts.

(The earlier Pathé films suffered a different fate: when removed from the vaults during the early days of television, the syndicators removed the title cards/credits, as well as the all-important intertitles. And of course, they hacked up the original negatives, not copies...)

 

I ‘liked’ your post for the information...NOT because I’m happy about it!

 

Yum-yum, eat em up.

 

Read on Amazon that the Complete
Collection box now has restored all
shorts to Cabin Fever/Vivendi remasters,
no more crappy Blackhawk junk, how can
we tell which set is the new one?

 

Not only that, but according to an article by Richard W. Bann regarding the current effort to restore the Laurel & Hardy films -- the film prints were returned to M-G-M, which scrapped them to reclaim the silver content.

I don't know if there is a way to identify them by looking at the package, but as this was done over ten years ago, how likely is it that currently available copies at Amazon, etc., would be the corrected versions?

The single volumes definitely are the corrected versions.

By the way -- there are a couple of early talkie shorts which "kind of" have original titles, but not really 100%. I forget exactly which but I think one of them is "Bouncing Babies." What I mean is, it has the original title cards, but the M-G-M trademarks are removed or obscured. But for all intents and purposes, they're original. Or almost.

Also by the way -- the final disc of the box set (with a few silent shorts) was not released separately. I would have to go back and check the specifics, but at least one or two of them had Blackhawk titles, and one had a Blackhawk-created score replacing the original Victor score. I don't know if they would have bothered trying to fix the bonus disc.

And -- the box set was called "complete," under the condition that it included all 80 of the Hal Roach talkies, which were released to TV under the title "The Little Rascals." But they forgot that the original "Little Rascals" TV package also included some of the Roach/M-G-M silent shorts (whichever were known to be extant at the time). But only three silent shorts are in the box set.

 

Just throwing my 2¢ in to say that while it’s obviously better to get 35mm prints than 16mm Blackhawk prints (which have Blackhawk title cards), I hope people don’t forget how vital Blackhawk Films was back then.

Blackhawk was the only source for uncut Rascals shorts, not to mention offering titles that were not shown anywhere on TV.

Blackhawk also restored “Railroadin’” to its status as the second talking Rascals short by being able to locate a long-thought-lost copy of the film’s original soundtrack (on disc).

So before throwing terms like “crappy Blackhawk junk” around, I wish folks would make an effort to understand why the Blackhawk prints are out there in the first place.

 

Blackhawk was a wonderful company. I used to get catalogs from them, but rarely could afford to buy anything from them.

They also released L&H's "Unaccustomed As We Are" with sound for the first time, as well as "Duck Soup" and the first reel of "The Battle Of The Century," all of which were previously lost.

 

Yes. The catalogs were pretty great.

But, also quite sad when they announced the discontinuation of 8mm film prints in the wake of the rise of VHS (which made me feel like I’d backed the wrong horse).

The first Blackhawk print I owned was “The Kid From Borneo”, which was actually purchased at a shop in Cambridge, MA that specialized in 8mm films. (IIRC, it was the only Rascals film they had in stock, and I didn’t want to go home empty-handed after the hassle of getting to the store.)

My first order from them directly was for the aforementioned “Railroadin’”. (Being a previously-(semi)-lost film was the big draw there.)

Since those two films were bought early on, I definitely over-watched them as my “library” of 8mm stuff grew extremely slowly due to the cost of the format.

 

Agreed about Blackhawk being a great source for silent films in the 1970s, pre VHS days.

I checked out many Blackhawk titles from my local library as a kid. I would spend hours in my room with my Montgomery Wards dual 8 projector discovering the art of Our Gang, Keaton, Harry Langdon, Chaplin -many others.

 

Agreed Blackhawk was a quality organization back on the day. Unlike many other fly-by-night home movie companies, Blackhawk actually cared about the look and source of their prints. I remember getting a copy of The Goldrush for my birthday in the mid 70s and being astonished at how good the film looked.

 

I noticed these uploads a while back too. According to the Maltin/Bann
book on "Our Gang", many of the MGM films from '27 – '29 were lost
and that was as recently as 1992. So this is very good news.

Now we can see the original gang: Mickey, Mary, Joe, Farina, Sunshine
Sammy, Jack Davis, Johnny Downs, Pineapple Jackson, Peggy Cartwright,
Weston and Winston Doty, Monty O'Grady and Jackie Condon.

 

thanks again for updated posts in this Thread.

 

I guess this would be the appropriate place to mention that a more complete version of the very first Our Gang film has been recently discovered. Whereas before, a version of the film has been circulating with around 50% of the original footage. The film is now at least 80% complete, if not more. I do not currently have any info on a possible release for the film, but I can confirm that more footage has been found.