Bored of Education - 1936

We’re going back to school over the next two posts. First, the Little Rascals and their elementary school woes, and on Thursday, Harold Lloyd’s college hijinks.

“Bored of Education” (1936), pits the Little Rascals, known before TV serialization as Our Gang, against the First Day of School. Darla brings a shiny apple for the teacher, Porky eats it, Buckwheat is just plain funny sitting there, but the plot focuses on our heroes Alfalfa and Spanky, who are loathe to suffer The New Teacher.

They decide to get out of class by Alfalfa faking a toothache, and Spanky charged with the mercy mission bringing him home. There are suitable histrionics, slow burns, double takes, a rather nauseating sequence of misadventures with a balloon shoved into Alfalfa’s mouth to make his cheek appear swollen, and an enormous kerchief wrapped under his chin and tied over to his head to indicate he is suffering. We had this discussion once before the comments section of the “Shadow on the Wall” (1950) post about the old movie use of kerchiefs to indicate toothache.


However, The New Teacher turns out to be very pretty and buys the kids off with ice cream, so Alfalfa and Spanky worm their way back into class. Alfalfa, told he must sing before he gets his ice cream, manfully girds his loins and screeches out a tortuous rendition of “Believe Me if All Those Endearing Young Charms.”


The funniest thing about this short is that it won an Oscar. Beating out “Moscow Moods” and “Wanted-A Master” (which had to do with a dog needing to find an owner before 3 o’clock when he is scheduled to be exterminated), we can see the competition was probably not too steep. Sounds like a cakewalk, actually.