Around 1960, a company called National Telepix acquired the rights to the silent Our Gang comedies and released them to television. These were the pre-Spanky and Alfalfa ones and the National Telepix folks sliced them all down — without a lot of care — into short segments to which they added funny music and sound effects and inane narration. They then sent these chopped-up, hoked-up comedies into the world under two series names. One, which was briefly on Los Angeles television, was called The Mischief Makers. The other one I don't recall ever seeing but it had the catchy title, Those Lovable Scallawags with Their Gangs. Both series also included some segments from an ancient series of short comedies called The Dippy Doo-Dads which featured monkeys in odd costuming.
The Mischief Makers at least had a catchy animated title sequence — created by the great animation director, Gene Deitch — and this is it. Or rather, this is one of them. I am quite certain there was another version of this opening in which they sang the same tune but the lyrics mentioned Our Gang. I vividly recall the kids chorus singing, "Skiddely, skiddely, bang bang bang / Don't forget to watch Our Gang."
And what occurs to me — and this is theory on my part — is that the films aired initially with that song and that whoever then owned the rights to Our Gang (M.G.M., I believe) made them change those lyrics to the ones in our clip today. What is certain though is that at one point, the 22 year body of work that was Our Gang was being marketed to television in four packages: National Telepix had the silents in their two series, Hal Roach's company was selling the 1927-1938 talkies under the title, The Little Rascals and M.G.M. was hawking the 1938-1944 films under the Our Gang title.
Here's the opening and closing to The Mischief Makers…