Gary Jasgur, Actor: Aladdin's Lantern. Gary Jasgur was born on November 8, 1935 in Los Angeles, California, USA as Melvyn Gary Jasgur. He was an actor, known for Aladdin's Lantern (1938), The Pigskin Palooka (1937) and Feed 'em and Weep (1938). He was married to Deanne Eisenberg. He died on August 22, 1994 in Los Angeles. The coronavirus pandemic has caused widespread disruption to the lives of everyone in Tampa Bay and to so many businesses in our community. Here at the Tampa Bay Times, we continue to provide free.
Alfalfa tries to get a recording contract with an honest to goodness company. The adults there have fun with him and give him a contract-for 20 years in the future! Alfalfa thinks this means he'll be a star and soon dreams of great fame-singing songs like 'The Barber of Seville' and the like. And, interestingly, in his dream he is 20 years older-but looks exactly like he does back in 1937. The dream, however, turns out to be a nightmare. With the addition of Alfalfa and Darla to the cast of regulars came a marked change in the types of shorts made by Hal Roach. Instead of focusing exclusively on laughs, the newer ones often had singing and dancing.
To make it worse, Alfalfa's horrible singing, while initially a passable gag, was featured too often-trying to generate cheap laughs. I am sure that the popularity drop of these kids can be attributed, in part, to the studio losing sight of what made the films popular in the first place-the kids acted like kids. No sane child acts like Alfalfa, that's for sure!! And as for Darla, but I always thought she looked plasticized-and a bit creepy-not a real child in any way. This is the second Our Gang Follies film-the first being 'Our Gang Follies of 1936'. While this one has a bit more plot than the last, it is essentially chock full of singing and dancing.
I can't see how children in the movie theaters would enjoy all this singing and dancing-but the parts of the film without that are pretty cute. Unfortunately, the momentum is constantly derailed by the insane need to do all the show tunes and wriggling-yuck! Pretty tough going in this one.