Time Out for Lessons

"Time Out For Lessons" was a pretty good short, it is okay to have fun, as long as you do not neglect your schoolwork, his friends were pretty furious when they heard that he did not study before the big game. I give this short *******out of**********.

An OUR GANG Comedy Short.

With the help of his dad, Alfalfa imagines what it would be like in college, when, as a football hero, he is ineligible to play in the big game because he neglected his TIME OUT FOR LESSONS.

This little movie with a moral, made when the Rascals were a bit older, is thoroughly unfunny. Only the jitterbugging scene - with Darla belting out `Swinging The Jinx Away' - has any pep to it.

I beg to differ with critics such as Leonard Maltin and others who critiqued it as a humorless, moralizing short. I saw humor in the dance scene, in Coach Spanky and Leonard Landy, in both of the dorm and locker room scenes, and the reaction of the kids at the end to the statement by Alfalfa "from now on we take time out for lessons" as if they weren't taking the statement seriously in undertones of "sure, yeah, and I bet". Even the way Alfalfa expressed the statement came across as mocking. The only one who seemed serious and didactic was Alfalfa's dad. I found more humor in this short than such Our Gang classics as "Fly My Kite" and "Dogs is Dogs". I viewed it not as a moralizing short but a moralizing spoof.

Time Out for Lessons (1939)

* (out of 4)

Alfalfa and Mickey are in a room where they're supposed to be doing homework but they're actually planning out a football play. Alfalfa is on his way out to practice when his father stops him and wants to talk about his future without studying. We then cut to a fantasy sequence where Alfalfa is in school, not studying and it's the night before a big game. TIME OUT FOR LESSONS has a message but it's completely lost throughout the incredibly boring and lifeless story. There have been quite a few negative Our Gang shorts from MGM but this here is certainly the worst that the series has seen up to this point. There's really not too many good things you can say about this other than it thankfully just runs 9-minutes so it's over rather quickly. Outside of this there's really nothing going on here. It's pretty bad when the kids themselves can't bring any charm to the film because they usually do at least that. There's simply no story here and dragging it out doesn't help anything. Even worse is that there's not a single laugh to be had and you really had to wonder what the writers were thinking when they came up with this.

Time Out For Lessons serves as just another example of how MGM ruined the Our Gang series by substituting messages for comedy. Here we see 12-year old Alfalfa fantasizing about a football career at the expense of his homework and the resulting consequences. About the best thing that can be said for this entry is that with the exception of Mickey (Robert Blake) Gubitosi, it lacks the increasingly obnoxious cast that would later infect the series as the old Hal Roach cast outgrew their roles. This is slight comfort compared to having to sit through a humorless one-reel "comedy." Hal Roach would never let this script on the set. MGM would produce a total of 52 Our Gang shorts from 1938-43 (released into 1944), perhaps 5 of them approach the level of the earlier Roach-produced entries. Time Out For Lessons isn't one of them!