Nov 20, 2002

"Simply Romantical!"
No, I don't need the services of a spell-checker. I refer in the post-title to a dialogue from the delightful The Little Rascals. The cast is composed almost entirely of children, but the plot has all the masala aspects that would make any hard-boiled movie moghul see epic drama. Such as dosti, mohabbat, how a girl gets in the way of the aforementioned langotiya yaari (in this case because these are really little kids, the cliché is more appropriate) and the baap-of-all-climax-ideas, the pulsating race to the finish with a (literally, watch it to get it) hair-raising end.
It may sound terribly cliched, but it isn't that bad. Look at it from another world, a world from about 3 feet high where some of the citizens can't even read yet (At one point, one kid tells another while keenly inspecting a notice for a while ... holding it upside down: "We ought to learn how to read"). The treatment, my dear, is the difference and there are some very imaginative dialogues and situations.
At the heart of the plot is the "He-Man Womun Haters Club" (sic), a group of little boys whose sole motto in life is to be *men*, and one of the core commandments is to eschew all female companionship in all forms. So when Alfalfa decides he's lost his heart to Darla, there is conflict ... with his best pal Spanky who also happens to be club President. And when the clubhouse burns down and Darla is swept off by rich kid Waldo and the club's prize motorcar... but I'd ruin it for the others. Add to this smorgasbord, characters like Porky & Buckwheat, Uh-uh (so named because he's never been recorded as saying anything else, a misconception that he eloquently dismisses in the last scenes), Stymie, Froggy and the mandatory monkey & dog chipping in with a couple of misfit kid villains. If you're looking for big names in the cast, they only appear in guest roles: Whoopi Goldberg, Mel Brooks, Donald Trump & Darryl Hannah among others.
As the kids would say: O-Tay!

PostScript: Turns out that this film (made in 1994) is based on a 1954 TV series by the same name. Info as usual from IMDB.

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