Our Gang - Legacy and Influence

Legacy and Influence

The characters in this series became well-known cultural icons, and could often be identified solely by their first names. The characters of Alfalfa, Spanky, Buckwheat, Darla, and Froggy were especially well known. Like many child actors, the Our Gang children were subsequently typecast and had trouble outgrowing their Our Gang images.

Several Our Gang alumni, among them Carl Switzer, Scotty Beckett, Norman Chaney, Billy Laughlin, Donald Haines and Bobby Hutchins, met with untimely deaths before the age of forty. This led to rumors that there was an Our Gang/Little Rascals "curse", a rumor popularized by a 2002 E! True Hollywood Story documentary entitled The Curse of the Little Rascals. The Snopes.com website debunks the rumor that there is an Our Gang curse, stating that there was no evidence of a pattern of unusual deaths when taking all of the major Our Gang stars into account, despite the tragic deaths of a select few.

The children's work in the series went largely unrewarded in later years, although Spanky McFarland received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame posthumously in 1994. Neither he nor any of the other Our Gang children ever received any residuals or royalties from reruns of the shorts or licensed products with their likenesses. The only remittances they received were their weekly salaries during their time in the gang, which ranged from $40 a week for newcomers to $200 or more a week for stars like Farina, Spanky, and Alfalfa.

One notable exception is Jackie Cooper, who was later nominated for an Academy Award and had a full career as an adult actor. Cooper is known today for portraying Perry White in the Superman movies starring Christopher Reeve, as well as for directing episodes of TV series such as M*A*S*H and Superboy.

The 1930 Our Gang short Pups is Pups was deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress, and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2004.