You might not want to watch it in its entirety — this one runs a little under 27 minutes — but I thought someone would appreciate the link to "Dogs of War," a 1923 silent Our Gang comedy produced by the Hal Roach Studio…and also starring the Hal Roach Studio. It begins with the kids staging war games on a vacant lot and segues to them visiting the Roach lot, though it's called something else. There, they get mixed up in the movie-making of the day and there are some nice views of the process. There's also an almost surreal (at least by 1923 standards) ending where the youngsters have made their own movie and it's full of odd visual effects. Harold Lloyd, who was then about the biggest name in film comedy, has a nice cameo about two-thirds of the way into the proceedings.
This was one of the better Our Gang comedies of the period and this copy has a serviceable musical score on it — one that is probably a lot like those ad-libbed at the time by organ accompanists in theaters around the world. There were a lot of "kid" comedies being made by film studios then but the cleverness of this one demonstrates why the Our Gang series was the most popular and the only one that has really endured.
And before someone asks: For reasons I never understood, not even after putting the question once to Mr. Roach himself, the series had a couple of different names, sometimes using "Our Gang" and sometimes not, and wasn't too picky about what it called itself until around 1932. That's when "Our Gang" became pretty much official. The films changed ownership a few times after that and there were other names and maybe someday if I can muster the courage, I'll attempt to explain the back-and-forth. Or maybe I'll take the easy way out and refer you to the definitive book on the subject, which was written by Leonard Maltin and Richard Bann, and which itself changed its name from Our Gang to The Little Rascals: The Life and Times of Our Gang. Very confusing stuff.
