Surprised Parties

I watched another movie that I had recorded from TCM recently where there was enough time left in TCM's programming slot that they could put in a short. That short was the Our Gang short Surprised Parties, and since I haven't talked much about the Our Gang shorts, I figured I should do a post on this one.

This being a one-reeler, there's not much of a plot here. I don't mean that in a bad way; just to say that you can't really fit all that much into 10 minutes. The movie starts off at a birthday party where the later iteration of the Our Gang kids are, including Robert Blake as Bobby. As the party is breaking up, Froggy is sad, and when the other members ask him what he's sad about, he says it's because he was born on February 29, so he doesn't get to have birthday parties very often. Really. You'd think Mom would schedule a party on February 28 or March 1.

His friends decide to do a nice thing for him, which is to hold a surprise party for him. Now, they make the mistake of holding it at the clubhouse, which means that Froggy is going to show up at the clubhouse while preparations are going on. To be fair, that's not the real mistake since it's not as if the gang has any place else to hold the party. The bigger mistake is that they try to keep the fact that the party is going to be for Froggy a secret so that he really will be surprised. Froggy draws the natural assumption that the other club members don't really care for him. Worse, everybody else is still trying to keep the surprise a secret, too.

So Froggy comes up with the plan that, if everybody else is going to hold a party and not invite him, he'll sabotage their party. He then shows up to the party dressed as a little girl, and speaking in falsetto, with the rest of the movie being the sight gags of how he sabotaged things at the party.

From everything I've read, the general view is that once MGM got their hands on the Our Gang franchise, the quality of the shorts went down. To be honest, I haven't seen enough of the shorts to make a judgment. Judged independently, Surprised Parties isn't bad, although I can see why people might draw the conclusion that earlier shorts were better. This one feels a bit tired, and rushed at the same time as they only have 10 minutes to play with.

I'd probably have to look for DVD box sets, but since the movies were made by various production companies, they don't all seem to be in one box set.