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The Little Rascals Curse Is Somehow Darker Than You Remember

The original Our Gang kids became comedy icons, but their offscreen lives were often far darker than anything on camera.

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The Little Rascals began as a series of short films produced by Hal Roach Studios under the Our Gang banner. Between 1922 and 1944, 220 Our Gang comedies were released, featuring an ever-changing group of mischievous children, such as the iconic Alfalfa. Other names that might sound familiar to younger readers include Stymie, Spanky, and Buckwheat, who was famously parodied by Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live. A number of Little Rascals spinoffs followed, well into the new millennium, the most recent being the 2014 movie The Little Rascals Save the Day.

But these days, there’s a dark cloud that hovers over the legacy of the original Our Gang films. While we fully acknowledge that it’s not unusual for the cast members of a series that old to have mostly died by now, many of them did so under tragic circumstances........

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