tavm Review of Boys Will Be Joys

Boys Will Be Joys (1925)

The version I originally saw of Boys Will Be Joys was abridged to one reel but now I've seen the two-reel version

[6/10 · 4 February 2008]

This Hal Roach comedy short, Boys Will Be Joys, is the forty-second in the "Our Gang/Little Rascals" series. The version I saw was on Goodtimes' VHS of "Our Gang Comedy Festival II". It was a shortened one-reel version of an originally two-reel film. And since this version was handled by a company other than the original Hal Roach Studios or their distributor Pathe Exchange, the series title was "Those Lovable Scallawags with Their Gangs" with the episode title being "Carnival Time". With the original H.M. Walker intertitles removed, here's the synopsis, in my own words, I partly got from the definitive book on the "Our Gang/Little Rascals" series by Leonard Maltin and Richard W. Bann: While the gang has plans for a new amusement park in an acre of their choosing, the surveyor tells them it's being used for a future factory. Undeterred, they see the sixty-year-old president of the land-owning company who has the heart of a ten-year-old. After hearing the gang's story, he decides to make their dream come true and walks out on his own meeting! The board of directors follow him hoping to get the chairman to agree to get him voted off. In the end, with the kids and some of the men helping in operating the makeshift rides, the president tells the board he's retiring and vows to think as young as the gang are...Not very amusing and the rides seem not too convincing as simply the creation of the kids-even with the financier's fun-loving aid. There is an interesting angle of a fluidly moving shot of a boy going backwards on a slide in a wheel-less vehicle that was partly fascinating. I was also amused by Farina's displaying of a "Wild Animal" in his tent-which turns out to be a skunk. Otherwise, Boys Will Be Joys was just an average "Our Gang" short. Update: 9/26/14-I've now seen the original two-reel version with original opening credits and intertitles. There's now another funny scene involving the company president playing baseball with some strangers. Guess where the ball winds up? For that reason, I'm now upping the rating from 3 to 6.