tavm Review of Jubilo, Jr.

Jubilo, Jr. (1924)

Jubilo, Jr. is an excellent "Our Gang" short with honest sentimentality

[10/10 · 3 February 2008]

This Hal Roach comedy short, Jubilo, Jr., is the twenty-ninth entry in the "Our Gang/Little Rascals" series. In this one, the title character walks through a field and sees three tramps singing "That Old Gang of Mine". As he sits with them, he reminisces about his boyhood days when his parents were poor. On his mother's birthday, the father refuses to buy her something since he felt he spent too much on Christmas. So Jubilo resolves to get a job that paid enough for $3.00 for a hat he sees through a store window. His first offer is to dig a hole for a dollar but the man who requested it was an asylum escapee. His friends, who had previously been turned down for baseball, offer to pay for covering the hole back up. Next, Jubilo hopes to get paid for carrying cement but, after the man refuses, he ends up dropping it in the muddy water with the rest of the gangs' feet now stuck with the cement on the way home! Finally, he decides to hold a circus with Joe posing as a strongman and Jackie posing as a Chinese juggler with balls attached to his head from strings. The profits only reached $2.70 so Jubilo reaches to the coin hidden on the refrigerator top for the rest of the balance. On the way home after the parents looked for the missing coin, the father spanks him before everything is explained and all is forgiven. And while the mother knows the hat is a bit fancy, she wears it to church the following Sunday. As Jubilo finishes his story, he's called back by director Charley Chase for the next take. Noticing the flower on his coat for his mother's birthday, Chase says, "You'll have to take that off, Mr. Rogers." Will Rogers obliges then, with the take done, his mother arrives in a limousine and shows off that same hat she got from him all those years ago as they laugh and then Will introduces his crew to her after one last look at his old gang as we fade...While Leonard Maltin and Richard W. Bann were a bit confused by the way this story turned out in their definitive book about Hal Roach's Rascals, I was willing to take it as the way Will's (fictional) life was in the context of the short. Certainly, Mickey Daniels is excellent as the title character as a young man. Loved the way Mary, in flirting with Mickey, suddenly does a "pshaw" every time he ditches her. And some of the scenes I mentioned in the synopsis were quite funny in this very sentimental short. So on that note, I highly recommend Jubilo, Jr. P.S. The grocer that Jubilo (Mickey Daniels) offered to work for was his father, Richard. And, once again, kudos to the YouTube poster who added the music of the "Little Rascals" composer, LeRoy Shield, to this short.