#RobertBlake #OurGang #NerdBlathering

Of course, Robert Blake's acting career began when he was a little kid. Under his birth name, Michael "Mickey" Gubitosi, he was part of the final iteration of Our Gang, the long-running (1922-1944) series of short comedies featuring a mixed-race cast of little kids doing little kid things.

Unfortunately, his time in the Gang was during the series' downhill spiral. After 16 years of running the show, the Gang's creator, Hal Roach (1892-1992) sold the entire Our Gang unit--including creative control and even the rights to the series' name--to MGM in 1938.

Once the giant studio had total control, they promptly excised anything from the films that resembled "comedy" and replaced it with heavy-handed morality plays and, eventually, wartime propaganda-type stuff before snuffing the whole thing in 1944 for various reasons (dwindling popularity, changing realities of motion picture exhibition and distribution, all the MGM Our Gang films really sucked--no wait that last part is just my humble but correct opinion, so take it as you will).

Oddly enough, from 1927 on, Roach had a distribution deal with MGM, but he retained creative control and whatnot, until he sold out. In the advent of television, the pre-MGM control films (mostly talkies from 1931 until 1938) were sold to TV in the 1950s under the name 'The Little Rascals' (because remember, he sold the rights to the name "Our Gang" too).

[All that stuff--except the opinionated part--gleaned from various reading around, but mostly 'Our Gang: The Life and Times of The Little Rascals,' Maltin and Bann's exhaustive history of the films first published in 1977].

Blake's death leaves 94-year old Sidney "Woim" Kibrick as the last living former child actor to have logged significant time in Our Gang. Kibrick, whose older brother Leonard was also in the films earlier in the 1930s, was often paired with Tommy "Butch" Bond, who in the mid and late 1930s was the bully kid often terrorising Alfalfa, Spanky, Buckwheat, and Porky.

For whatever reason, these little films retain a resonance -- I actually chalk it up to Boomers and Gen Xers like myself--who gorged themselves on them between the 1950s and the early 1980s when they were a staple of local-TV after-school kiddie blocks -- something that's largely gone away in modern TV.