Seeing the World

This Hal Roach comedy short, Seeing the World, is the fifty-fifth in the "Our Gang/Little Rascals" series. Teacher James Finlayson is excited about going to Europe but hadn't expected his students to go with him. They go to Naples, Pompeii, Rome, Venice, London, and Paris. It's in the last city that they go to the Eiffel Tower. Farina gets in a little trouble there...The version I watched of this short on Internet Archive had Russian intertitles so I couldn't understand what they were saying although the Our Gang filmography book by Leonard Maltin & Richard W. Bann mentions some of them. It also explains that while Fin and director Bob McGowan did go abroad, the kids in those sequences were of the children from there in long shots unless it's the obvious back-projection scenes with the real kids. Of real interest to me was the appearance of Stan Laurel in the London sequence wearing glasses in his brief scene. He later claimed to not appear in this or any Our Gang short (For the record, he also appeared with Oliver Hardy in Wild Poses). Perhaps his scene with Frank Butler was meant for something else as many scenes were pulled from newsreel footage like that of the then Prince of Wales who would later become King Edward VIII. Farina's sequence in the Eiffel Tower is pretty thrilling and a little funny though since this is a comedy, one isn't surprised when the ending comes. Overall, Seeing the World isn't hilarious but it is amusing in spots and is interesting as a travelogue of the time. P.S. This was supposedly Jean Darling's first OG appearance with her scene at the pier but I didn't notice her anywhere there. Anyway, she recently died last September 4 at age 93. Update-4/6/16: I just saw the English intertitle version on YouTube. The original rating stays.