Trivia: The son of a Los Angeles minister, three-year-old Matthew Beard won out of 350 kids to replace Allen "Farina" Hoskins as the resident black child in Hal Roach's Our Gang comedies. Nicknamed Hercules in his first two-reeler, Teacher's Pet (1930), Beard was thereafter known as Stymie because of his innocent offscreen habit of confounding his elders. Wearing an oversized derby hat (borrowed from Roach comedian Stan Laurel), the clever, resourceful, eternally grinning Stymie quickly became one of the most popular Our Gang kids. After appearing in 36 Our Gang shorts, Beard began freelancing in 1935, playing small roles in big films like Captain Blood (1935), Jezebel (1938), The Great Man Votes (1939), and Stormy Weather (1943). Alas, after dropping out of high school in 1945, he fell into a bad crowd, spending the next two decades in and out of jails for committing crimes to feed his drug habit. Miraculously, Beard completely turned his life around in the mid-'60s when he entered the drug rehab organization Synanon. Looking remarkably like the eternally optimistic Stymie of old, Matthew Beard made a successful show business comeback in the 1970s, appearing in such films as The Buddy Holly Story (1978) and such weekly TV series as Good Times and The Jeffersons.

Trivia: Nicknamed "Echo," Dorothy De Borba was the little brunette with the festive hair bows in the 1930-1933 Our Gang comedy shorts. De Borba arrived in the series at the dawn of sound, along with Jackie Cooper, Chubby Chaney, Stymie Beard, and Mary Ann Jackson, and her first series entries were released in both talkie and silent versions. Although the grown-up De Borba often complained that the boys were awarded the best lines, she certainly enjoyed her full share of quips in perhaps her best short, Love Business (1931), the one in which Jackie Cooper gets a fiery crush on Miss Crabtree (June Marlowe. De Borba, who had made her screen debut in the comedy-drama A Royal Romance (1930), left films after playing an autograph-hound in Jean Harlow's Bombshell (1933).

Trivia: Actor Sherwood Bailey is best known for playing the rusty-headed befreckled boy Spud in the Our Gang series. As an adult, Bailey left acting and became a civil engineer.

Trivia: Donald Haines was eight years old when he joined Hal Roach's "Our Gang" troupe in 1929. Haines appeared in Roach shorts until 1931; one of these was The First Seven Years (1930), in which he fought with Jackie Cooper over the affections of Mary Ann Jackson. The adversarial Haines-Cooper screen relationship would extend over a decade, with Donald and Jackie coming to blows (or threatening to do so) in such features as Skippy (1931), A Feller Needs a Friend (1932) and Seventeen (1940). Haines' other roles of note included Jerry Cruncher Jr. in Tale of Two Cities (1935), Alabama in Boys Town (1938) and Men of Boys Town (1940), and Skinny in six of Monogram's East Side Kids films. Donald Haines died while serving in WW II.

Trivia: Born in St. Cloud, MN, actress June Marlowe played leads in many silent films, most notably in the Rin Tin Tin adventure series. She also appeared in many comedies, notably the debut effort of Laurel and Hardy.

Trivia: A dapper-looking supporting comic from St. Louis, Otto H. Fries came to films in the early 1910s with a varied background in medicine shows and vaudeville. By 1915, he was with Keystone and a lifelong friendship with Stan Laurel led to appearances in that star comedian's early films for Bronco Billy Anderson. Not surprisingly, Fries later landed at Roach, where he supported not only Laurel & Hardy and Charley Chase but also such lesser lights as Max Davidson and James Finlayson. Sound proved no hindrance and Fries would appear in many of Roach's German-language talkies. Often cast as inebriates, Fries played scores of bit parts and walk-ons in grade-A films until the year of his death. A German actor with a similar surname (Otto Friese) acted in British films of the 1950s.

Trivia: A long-term Hal Roach contract actress, indomitable-looking Lyle Tayo was a foil to all of the Roach comics, including Laurel & Hardy (she was Hardy's wife in Their Purple Moment [1928]) and the Our Gang kids. The Gang especially enjoyed her presence and she would mother them all at one time or another, in such comedies as Big Business ([1924] Mickey's mother), Heebie Jeebies ([1927] Joe's mother), Shivering Shakespeare ([1930] Chubby's mother), and Dogs Is Dogs ([1931] Wheezer's aunt, for a change). Tayo, who sometimes billed herself Lyle Barton, left Roach in 1934, but continued to appear in bit parts until at least 1948, including one in The Yellow Rose of Texas (1944), a Roy Rogers oater in which she played one of the townswomen.

Trivia: The Little Rascals is the television title given to the Our Gang two-reel comedies produced by Hal Roach in the '20s and '30s. While he'd always wanted to make a series of comedies with children, Roach was not fond of cutesy "professional kids." He hit upon the Our Gang notion one morning in 1922 while watching a bunch of kids arguing over a piece of wood. The thought struck him that if he was fascinated with children behaving like real kids rather than miniature adults, audiences would be equally fascinated. The first film in the series, Our Gang, was lensed in 1922: The first of the group were African-American child actor Sunshine Sammy Morrison (already a popular Hal Roach contractee) and white kids Jackie Condon, Peggy Cartwright, Mickey Daniels, and Mary Kornman. Before 1923 was half over, two more early Our Gang stalwarts, fat Joe Cobb and black infant Allen "Farina" Hoskins, were added to the fold, as was the group's resident bull terrier, Pete the Pup. Under the supervision of Robert McGowan, 88 silent Our Gang two-reelers were produced, all greeted with squeals of delight by young and old moviegoers alike. The series had no trouble making the transition to sound in 1929: 58 more two-reelers and 22 one-reelers would emerge from the Roach fun factory before 1938. Given the fact that a "Ganger" was pretty much washed up by 12, there was quite a turnover in personnel. A handful of the Hal Roach kids went on to substantial adult careers, notably Jackie Cooper and Johnny Downs; for most of the Gangers, however, their fame rested almost entirely on their participation in the series. The best-known members of the troupe during the Roach days (in addition to those already mentioned) were George "Spanky" McFarland, Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer, Mathew "Stymie" Beard, Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas, Eugene Gordon "Porky" Lee, Tommy "Butch" Bond, Darla Hood, Mary Ann Jackson, Bobby "Wheezer" Hutchins, Norman "Chubby" Chaney, Darwood "Waldo" Kaye, Dickie Moore, Scotty Beckett and Wally Albright. In 1936, Roach cast the Gang in a feature film, General Spanky, which opened to general indifference. Having converted his studio to a feature-film factory by 1936, Roach was considering dropping Our Gang as he had his Laurel and Hardy and Charley Chase two-reelers, but was prevented from doing so by Louis B. Mayer. Mayer, the head of MGM (which distributed the Roach product), was crazy about the series, so Roach agreed to continue, albeit economically cutting back the running time of each short from two reels to one. In 1938, Roach sold the entire Our Gang package directly to MGM, which continued churning out Our Gang one-reelers until 1944. The MGM shorts were by and large pale shadows of the best Roach films; while the Roach shorts had concentrated on the sort of adventures an average healthy kid could get into (with a bit of poetic license to allow for slapstick and funny dialogue), the MGMs became insipid 10-minute morality plays dealing with everything from traffic safety to wartime conservation. In addition, the children began acting unnaturally, over-emphasizing their lines and mugging atrociously to the camera. As Spanky, Alfalfa and the other veterans outgrew the series, MGM started hiring as unappealing a troupe of urchins as has ever been seen in films, including Billy "Froggy" Laughlin and Janet Burston. Worst of all was whiny little Mickey Gubitosi -- who (much to the amazement of those who'd suffered his "Gang" appearances) grew up to become top dramatic actor Robert Blake. By the time the last MGM Our Gang short, Dancing Romeo, was released in 1944, only Buckwheat remained from the Roach days. While the mediocre MGM films went a long way in destroying the series' reputation, the TV boom made the old Hal Roach Our Gangs saleable again. Since Roach had sold the Our Gang imprimatur to MGM, he was obliged to alter the series' name on prints of his old shorts: that's why the Roach films have been running on TV for forty years under the title The Little Rascals. Since the series' resurgence of popularity in the '50s, several efforts have been made to revive the "Rascals" with a new group of children. Producers ranging from former "Ganger" Jackie Cooper to Hal Roach himself tried and failed to make new kid comedies; the general consensus was that it would be impossible to come up with child actors as natural and ingenuous as the original troupe. In 1994, however, director Penelope Spheeris came forth with The Little Rascals: The Movie, which met with respectable though not spectacular box-office receipts. Perhaps sensing that a "new" Rascals contingent would be difficult to create, Spheeris chose to cast lookalikes for Spanky, Alfalfa, Stymie, Buckwheat, Darla and other favorite Rascals. While the results were amusing, they proved that Hal Roach and Jackie Cooper were right: you can't completely successfully revive The Little Rascals simply because the original children were so unique -- and so essentially real.