Billie Thomas
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| Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas | |
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 Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas in the 1935 Our Gang comedy Teacher's Beau. |
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| Born | March 12, 1931 Los Angeles, California |
| Died | October 10, 1980 (aged 49) Los Angeles, California |
| Occupation | Film actor |
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Billie Thomas (originally William Thomas, Jr.) (March 12, 1931 – October 10, 1980) was an American child actor best remembered for portraying the character of Buckwheat in the Our Gang (Little Rascals) short films from 1934 until the series' end in 1944. He was a native of Los Angeles, California.
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Our Gang and later life
Although the character he played was often the subject of controversy in later years for containing elements of the "pickaninny" stereotype, Thomas always defended his work in the series, pointing out that Buckwheat and the rest of the black Our Gang kids were treated as equals with the white kids in the series. The 1980s Little Rascals animated series adapted from the Our Gang comedies addressed the problem by changing Buckwheat into a clever inventor who is always building ingenious machines for the gang.
After Our Gang was discontinued in 1944, Thomas played some small parts in other films, but soon left show business altogether. As an adult, he worked as a film lab technician with the Technicolor corporation. Thomas died of a sudden heart attack in his Los Angeles apartment on October 10, 1980.[1]
[edit] Impersonations, controversy and an imposter
[edit] Saturday Night Live
Three years after Thomas's death, his character was parodied by Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live in a sketch that had Buckwheat as the target of an assassination. His assassin, "John David Stutts" (also played by Murphy), was in turn later assassinated in a scene that parallels Lee Harvey Oswald's murder by Jack Ruby. The skit was a parody on the extensive media coverage of the then recent murder of John Lennon and the attempt on Ronald Reagan's life — in particular, the focus on excessive attention given to the assassins and tributes from people only loosely associated with the victim.
The real Buckwheat's son, William Thomas, Jr., strongly protested Murphy's sketch. (Murphy's exaggerated portrayal of Buckwheat had the child actor supposedly retaining his tangled, unkempt hair and inarticulate speech even into adulthood.) Murphy performed other parody skits as well, including a murder attempt by Alfalfa and an advertisement for a record, Buh-Weet Sings. The latter skit contained the opening line which later became an SNL classic: "Hi, Ah'm Buh-Weet. Amembah me?" ("Hi, I'm Buckwheat. Remember me?") and Buckwheat performing popular music standards using stereotypical vernacular pronunciations(e.g., "Munce! Tice! Fee tines a mady"). The record advertisement sketch was the first in the series of Murphy's sketches. It was performed on SNL exactly one year to the day after Thomas's death. Another Buckwheatism attributed to Murphy's inaccurate impersonation of the famous rascal, "O'Tay!", was actually invented by Eugene Gordon "Porky" Lee.
[edit] 20/20
In 1990, the ABC newsmagazine 20/20 aired a segment purporting to be an interview with Buckwheat, now a downtrodden minimum wage grocery bagger in Arizona. However, the interview was actually with a man named Bill English, who had made a career of claiming to be the adult Buckwheat. By the next week, 20/20 had learned of their error (George "Spanky" McFarland personally contacted the media following the broadcast), that the true Buckwheat had been dead for 10 years, and admitted their mistake on-air. Fallout from this incident included the resignation of a 20/20 producer, and a negligence lawsuit filed by the son of William Thomas.[2]
[edit] Other controversies
In 2007, Louisiana State Representative Carla Dartez, a Democrat, came under fire from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for calling one of her female volunteers "Buckwheat." The local chapter of the NAACP threw its support behind her Republican opponent, who won the November 17, 2007 run-off election.[3]
Buckwheat and his mispronunciation of the word Okay are mentioned on Lil' Wayne's verse on the Brisco single, "In The Hood".
[edit] References
- ^ "Spanky" McFarland discusses Buckwheat in a 1987 appearance
- ^ "'20/20' Producer Resigns Over Buckwheat Interview." Los Angeles Times. Oct. 12 1990. Part F. Page 25.
- ^ La. Pol's 'Buckwheat' Remark Draws Ire
