Review of Telling Whoppers

This Hal Roach comedy short, Telling Whoppers, is the fifty-sixth in the "Our Gang/Little Rascals" series. A bully named Toughey (Johnny Downs) is terrorizing the Gang with Farina-who is pretending to be on crutches and a cast-especially getting it. Eventually he and Joe are picked to beat him up. But a mix-up involving swimming, cops, and a "murder" threatens to expose the lie the two make up involving the bully to the rest of their friends...When Leonard Maltin and Richard W. Bann wrote a review of this short in their book "The Little Rascals: the Life and Times of Our Gang", they mentioned a couple of scenes I didn't see in the YouTube upload-Toughey making the gang pay for his kitty and also standing on their heads. What I did see was some repetitious fighting of him with Farina which threatened to make me cringe more than laugh though that "cast" unravelling was good for some laughs. It did get better after that bully goes by himself swimming and that "murder" makes Farina and Joe really scared especially whenever they see cops! So on that note, I recommend Telling Whoppers for anyone who's an Our Gang completist. P.S. There's also a scene of shadows of what look like hanging ropes to Joe and Farina that almost made me uncomfortable because of what happened to members of Farina's race during that period but because Joe was also scared, that sequence-and a subsequent one involving lots of policemen-got me quickly laughing heartily the whole time.