Hide and Shriek was the last of 169 Our Gang shorts produced by the legendary Hal Roach. Roach always maintained he had solid financial reasons for bailing out of short subject production but I think it ran a little deeper than the advent of the double feature squeezing them out--- he could have maintained the distribution deal with MGM (and thus the powerful Lowes theater chain) so it's hard to swallow that the format was facing imminent doom. In fact, all the major studios' shorts departments flourished through the early-mid 1950's (MGM itself maintained the hypo-nasal Pete Smith specialties, the Crime Does Not Pay series and the splashy Technicolor travelogs until well after WW2). But Hal sold what he could and ended the others and went off to make several highly successful feature films. Roach enjoyed tremendous success with several Laurel & Hardy features, the Topper franchise, 1-Million Years' B.C. (rumored to be one of the biggest grossers of 1940!) and the prestigious Of Mice and Men. Ironically the singular feature failure was General Spanky (1936), which largely can be blamed on a terrible concept of placing the kids in Civil War (!). The last 3 Hal Roach Our Gangs did not feature Spanky--- he was on loan to RKO for Peck's Bad Boy with the Circus (1938), but would rejoin the entire cast over at MGM with Aladdin's Lantern (released 9/17/38). MGM's inability to properly handle comedies is legendary and the Our Gang debacle is one of the best examples of what not to do with a successful formula. Roach knew how to entertain an audience and even the weakest of his shorts show his studio cared about the product. For all of it's production values, MGM treated Our Gang like a farm animal through 52 more entries. Sadly, these are the ones most often seen. After decades of classic shorts from Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chase, Laurel & Hardy and Chester Conklin, Our Gang's Hide and Shriek was the very last short Hal Roach would ever produce--- worth seeing for that fact alone.
