Review of One Wild Ride

This Hal Roach comedy short, One Wild Ride, was the forty-fifth in the "Our Gang/Little Rascals" series. Mickey and Joe are a little down because they're doing chores: Mickey planting seeds and Joe churning butter. When Jackie and John stop by in a horse-pushing car (yes, you read that right), Mickey and Joe stop what they're doing and join them with Joe using a moving pulley from a windmill to continue the churning while his baby brother looks on with his stuffed animal toy being pulled on the top of his carriage (that's the last we see of him). Rich girl Mary watches the gang pump a tire from her window and decides to join them. During one of these rides, Johnny's upset father takes the horse away leaving the gang to try to find another way to get the engine-less car going. They eventually get one car to pull theirs toward a hill that they slide down before getting another one to pull them back up. Little Farina follows them on foot during much of this time and keeps begging for a ride but gets pushed away each time. When the gang stops for some rest, Farina takes the rope attached to the car, ties it to a truck, and takes the wheel as the truck pulls it away. This leads to one long wild ride...This was quite an exciting "Our Gang" entry from start to finish and made me quite concerned for Farina's safety for much of the second reel even though I knew it had to be a mix of simulated split-screen between Farina's car and moving point-of-view road footage as well as some possible rear screen projection when he's seen from one side. Among some other funny gags: Mary's accidentally pushing grapefruit juice on her mother's face, Farina's car knocking down a man whose goldfish bowl causes the bowl to land on Farina's head and the fish under his shirt, a later organ grinder's monkey giving Farina's face grief with his tail, and-for the finish-the car knocking a watermelon cart with the contents falling down next to the now-overturned car with the youngster rising out among them! Quite a hilarious thrilling ride from director Robert McGowan, so much so he'd remake it as the "Little Rascals" talkie Free Wheeling seven years later. And kudos once again for the YouTube poster who added the LeRoy Shield music from those later talkies.