Matthew "Stymie" Beard Filmography

Our Gang, also known as The Little Rascals or Hal Roach's Rascals, was a series of American comedy short films about a group of poor neighborhood children and the adventures they had together. Created by comedy producer Hal Roach, the series is noted for showing children behaving in a relatively natural way, as Roach and original director Robert F. McGowan worked to film the unaffected, raw nuances apparent in regular children rather than have... them imitate adult acting styles. In addition, Our Gang notably put boys, girls, whites and blacks together in a group as equals, something that "broke new ground," according to film historian Leonard Maltin. Such a thing had never been done before in cinema but has since been repeated after the success of Our Gang. The first production at the Roach studio in 1922 was a series of silent short subjects. When Roach changed distributors from Pathé to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1927, and converted the series to sound in 1929 the series took off even further. Production continued at the Roach studio until 1938, when the series was sold to MGM, who then continued producing the comedies for another six years.
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