General Spanky

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General Spanky
Directed by	Fred Newmeyer and Gordon Douglas
Produced by	Hal Roach
Written by	Richard Flournoy John Guedel Carl Harbaugh Hal Yates
Starring	George "Spanky" McFarland Phillips Holmes Rosina Lawrence Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer
Music by	Marvin Hatley
Cinematography	Art Lloyd Walter Lundin
Distributed by	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release date(s)	December 11, 1936
Running time	71 min.
Language	English
IMDb profile

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.

Modern audiences could be offended by the innate, casual racist attitude of the film and its racist language (calling adult black men "Boy" or children "Picaninny"). One early scene has the abandoned Buckwheat going from white man to white man plaintively asking each "Would you be mah massa?"