Ye Olde Minstrels (1941) User Reviews

Ye Olde Minstrels is the first musical short in the Our Gang series to violate the premise of kids putting on a show

[tavm · 5/10 · 28 January 2015]

This M-G-M musical short, Ye Olde Minstrels, is the one hundred ninety-eighth entry in the "Our Gang" series and the one hundred tenth talkie. Despite Spanky's reluctance to stage another musical show since the last one for Waldo's lemonade stand was a flop, he and the gang do want to raise money for the Red Cross. So Froggy enlists his uncle, Walter Wills, to stage a minstrel show. Okay, when there previously were revues in the OG series, it would either be a makeshift operation with all the amateurishness that would imply or, in the case of Our Gang Follies of 1938, the professionalism would be easily explained as a dream. Well, even with Froggy's uncle involved, this was too much professionalism for the series. Besides, having Froggy have a solo singing spot is a bit painful to watch and almost makes one miss Alfalfa who at least was usually funny when he sang off-key! Good thing Darla sounds better than ever singing "Auld Lang Syne" near the end. Oh, and Walter Wills isn't too bad warbling "Lazy Moon" though, of course, the blackface is out of the question in today's world. I was a little amused, however, when Buckwheat temporarily looked white during that sequence. So on that note, Ye Olde Minstrels is worth a look.

The kids put on a minstrel show for the Red Cross

[dbborroughs · 4/10 · 25 September 2009]

The gang stages a minstrel show to raise money for the Red Cross with the help of a veteran performer. The film is essentially one long production number that kind of steers clear of racial stereotypes until near the very end when much of the cast is suddenly in black face. It's an odd moment that doesn't really work on its own terms (There is no point to it since it's so late in the short as to make you wonder why they bothered). Actually the film didn't really work at all for me since the music isn't all that good and the number is just everyone on risers singing and dancing. Probably one of the weakest of the "let's put on a show" films that appear in the MGM Our Gang series every fourth or fifth film.

Supposing you have three talented child actors...

[kpetnews · 13 September 2010]

...what would you do with them? Well, if you said put them on a stage with about a hundred other children so they could completely get lost in a crowd and do syncopated tambourine playing, you should have been writing for MGM in the forties! Back in the thirties, Hal Roach would make FUN of people who put kids up and made them perform like little shiny automatons. Now MGM's doing it as a matter of course. The concept behind this is a Red Cross benefit being orchestrated by some guy named Walter Wills, who's a household name even now, ha ha. The show culminates in a choreographed tap dance routine where the dancers suddenly sprout blackface as if by magic. And despite that the whole thing's still as memorable as a dog puddle in the middle of the street.

Poor Spanky. Poor Darla. And especially, poor Buckwheat.

Didn't anyone have a normal uncle?

[mmallory-89926 · 2/10 · 1 January 2019]

In its heyday MGM was the Tiffany of studios, and the place where film comedy went to die. In the 1920s it took Buster Keaton, robbed him of control, and made him do musicals and use stuntmen. In the 1930s it took the Marx Brothers and, after a good start, made them the zany hosts of increasingly shoddy musicals. in the 1940s it took Laurel and Hardy and simply told them what to do, removing any creative comic spark, sanded Abbott and Costello until they were smooth and shiny, and made Red Skelton a utility comic relief player. In between all that it took over Our Gang and turned them into minstrels, forcing what once had been a group of real kids into a road company Mickey-and-Judy act obsessed with putting on a show. "Ye Olde Minstrels" is the classic example of that. Even as a kid, watching this on TV, I realized how awful it was. If you really must see a white performer in blackface singing "Lazy Moon," watch Oliver Hardy's rendition in 1931's "Pardon Us," where the blackface at least has story motivation. And Ollie could sing.

The *absolute worst* MGM musical "Our Gang" short, tarnished by stereotypes

[Moax429 · 1/10 · 8 September 2004]

Definitely *the worst* MGM "Our Gang" mini-musical made.

I first saw this short in 1977 on a station in Battle Creek, Michigan, and wondered why the Detroit station didn't show it, despite the fact MGM Television included it in the syndication package. Then I discovered why. There was a visual ethnic stereotype which was done in *extremely* poor taste; for those who have the nerve to sit through this sorry waste of 10 minutes, it happened in the middle of the "Lazy Moon" finale - I *wouldn't dare* repeat it here! (Occasionally this and the other MGM-produced "Our Gangs" are shown on Turner Classic Movies as "One Reel Wonders.")

How could Louis B. Mayer, in his right mind, have decided to release such an appalling piece of junk like this? I'm sure if something like "Ye Olde Minstrels" was released in today's politically correct climate, the producers and distributors *wouldn't* get away with it! (I suppose Mayer was also a *bigot* - in one scene where the patterns are superimposed over the gang in the pyramid, one of those patterns was the Star of David. I would think that was Mayer's way of saying people of his ethnicity reigned supreme in Hollywood.)

And Leonard Maltin and Richard Bann, in their 1992 "Little Rascals" book, posed an appropriate question in their review of "Ye Olde Minstrels," and I paraphrase: "Why should an adult audience have to sit through a thing like this when they could go to a movie theater and see an MGM (or Warner Bros., Columbia, 20th Century Fox, etc.) feature?" One likely reason was because in those days, as Maltin and Bann pointed out elsewhere in the same book, there was an industry tactic called "block booking." Simply put, MGM and the other major studios were able to bankroll short subjects together with features in the same house, and then include all shorts in the same package as the feature - apparently a cost-saving measure - and MGM, in this case, had to force movie theater owners to play the package containing this sorry short, or otherwise they couldn't rent and show the studio's major features as well (the studios also blindly threw in some shorts into each package without giving the exhibitors a chance to evaluate them, this film being a prime example). The money the exhibitors paid MGM, as well as the total admission, was what helped recoup the cost of the short. (In 1948, four years after "Our Gang" ended, SCOTUS ultimately ruled (in the case United States v. Paramount Pictures) the "block booking" tactic as being *illegal,* i.e. violating the Sherman Antitrust Act; that ruling also led to the demise of the old studio "star system," as well as requiring the major studios who owned cinemas to divest themselves of said theater chains.)

Warner Bros., now that you bought out Turner Entertainment Co., and with it the pre-1985 backlog of MGM's movies and TV shows, *please* - if you ever decide to release some of the last 52 MGM "Our Gangs" on DVD, *don't* include "Ye Olde Minstrels" (or "The New Pupil" or "Family Troubles," the two worst non-musical "Our Gangs")!!!!