With the arrival of Alfalfa Switzer and Darla Hood to the Our Gang shorts, the comedies began taking a turn for the worse in my opinion. This is because practically all their films together up through "Arbor Day" involved singing and dancing--two things you NEVER saw in earlier Our Gang comedies. And, now that I think about it, because of all the singing and dancing, comedy was NOT as evident in these shorts. I still have a quite a few more shorts to see in the Our Gang DVD collection--hopefully they'll get better, but at this point I sure have noticed that the earlier shorts were simply a lot better.
In this contrived singing and dancing short, there is to be an Arbor Day pageant at school and Spanky is trying to play hooky to avoid seeing it...something which I can EASILY understand! However, in addition to the truant officer chasing Spanky to school, he comes across two midgets from the nearby circus and mistakenly thinks they are truant children and he forces them to go to school. The two are George and Olive Brasno--who previously guest starred in the Our Gang short "Shrimp For a Day".
If you do see this rather limp short, look for Hattie McDaniel who plays Buckwheat's mother.
Too much singing and dancing and not enough plot!
