Got to work from home today because of the "snow" and I'm watching the most bizarre Little Rascals movie. It's a full length feature (their only one, I believe) inexplicably set during the Civil War, where Spanky and Buckwheat (and later the rest of the gang), are fighting for the South against mostly contemptible Union soldiers.

Buckwheat happily becomes a slave on the plantation of the film's kindly Confederate hero who has adopted his pal Spanky. Of course, he and all the other slaves are perfectly content with their situation and openly hostile towards the yankees. At least Billie Thomas gets to play Buckwheat as a boy in this one. In his first several films, the character was still a girl and he had to play her in drag. The character gradually became male after the departure of Matthew Beard's Stymie character.

George McFarland is great, as always, as Spanky, and the film suffers somewhat from forcing him to share the focus with the adult lead. Of course, it also suffers from breaking out of the usual ten-twenty minute short formula and placing the established characters so far outside of their usual context, but it's still pretty interesting if only from a WTF perspective.