Wedding Worries

This is an amazing short, The Gang sabotages Darla's father's wedding, and this episode also marked Our Gang sweetheart Darla Hood's last and final apperance. This episode was released on December 13th, 1941(nearly one week after the Pearl Harbor bombing). I give this short **********out of**********.

This M-G-M comedy short, Wedding Worries, is the two hundred third entry in the "Our Gang" series and the one hundred fifteenth talkie. Darla's widowed father is getting married again and Darla is thrilled. The rest of the gang seem to be as well...until Froggy mentions a certain fairy tale story about how mean stepmothers are which convinces the gang to sabotage the wedding by any means necessary. Okay, there are quite some funny scenes like the "laughing gas" sequence and I also liked Froggy mixing various fairy tale wolves as one particular one but, as Leonard Maltin and Richard W. Bann pointed out in their Our Gang filmography book, this short doesn't make much sense especially since Darla isn't at all unhappy during the whole thing. And the ending, while amusing, isn't really something kids would consider enjoying watching since their counterparts on screen are the target of the irate adults! In summary, Wedding Worries is worth a look and nothing more. P.S. This was Darla Hood's last OG short. She would go on to a singing and voice-over career the rest of her life. One of her post-Rascal highlights was being a guest on "The Jack Benny Program" during the early sixties when she sang and played herself in the show's Our Gang parody. Her career came full circle in 1979 when she-and Stymie Beard-participated doing voices in "The Little Rascals' Christmas Special" with Ms. Hood voicing the mother of Spanky and Porky. But she died on June 13, 1979 at 47 of hepatitis, months before the special aired. This marked the first time I read of the death of an Our Gang member when I saw the item on the back of a section of a New Orleans paper. The second time was when I read of Stymie's in Newsweek two years later...

Apart from the unlikely setup of 13-year-old Spanky believing Froggy's story of an actual Big Bad Wolf, this is one of the funnier MGM shorts. Spanky, Mickey et al set to sabotage Darla's father's remarriage, because it will result in a stepmother and we all know what they're like from fairy tales. The final scene involving adults and "laughing gas" makes the short, in addition to the ultimate payoff. We can be glad that MGM forewent the usual preachy moral lesson this time.

As stated, this is Darla's last appearance in the Our Gang series. She'd outgrown the role about five shorts ago (but then again, so had Spanky) and towered over everyone else. Without Alfalfa, Butch or Waldo, no one knew what to do with her anyway, leading to her inexplicable presence in "Robot Wrecks". At least here she sets the plot in motion.