Independent Films, Film Profiles

General Spanky

General Spanky is a 1936 motion picture produced by Hal Roach. A spin-off of Roach's popular Our Gang short subjects, the film stars George "Spanky" McFarland, Phillips Holmes, Rosina Lawrence, Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas, and Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer. Directed by Fred Newmeyer and Gordon Douglas, it was originally released to theatres on December 11, 1936 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM).This film, a Civil War period piece, was intended as an experiment to determine if Roach could move Our Gang into features, as the double feature and block booking were slowly smothering his short subjects production. The film was a box office disappointment, and, after another year of shorts production, Roach ended up selling the Our Gang unit to MGM in May 1938.When Roach bought the rights to the back catalog of Our Gang films he'd produced from MGM in 1949, he did not buy back the rights to General Spanky. As a result, the film was part of the MGM catalog acquired by in 1986 by Turner Entertainment, who holds the rights today as a subsidiary of Warner Bros. General Spanky was released on VHS and laserdisc in the early 1990s.