User Reviews

This is a very early Our Gang short from Hal Roach Studios and the only one of the kids I quickly recognized were a very young Farina and Joe. That's because like most people alive today who are familiar with these comedies, we weren't exposed to the silent versions--which didn't get marketed to television like the newer films. Despite a lot of unfamiliar characters, this was still a very cute little comedy.

A bully has been making the lives of all the Gang members miserable. So, the guys decide to pick two patsies to beat up the bully. Naturally, the two youngest and least competent ones (Farina and Joe) are chosen. Despite being afraid, they soon think everything is fine when a girl tells them that the bully has moved away and they decide to lie to the rest of the gang and tell them that they took care of the bully themselves. The trouble is that soon there are reports that the bully was murdered and Joe and Farina are scared that the cops will think they did it! This leads to some funny scenes where they think the police are out to get them.

The short is well-paced, funny and worthwhile even to adults. Plus, from a historical perspective, it's a very interesting look at an early incarnation of the series.

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.