William "Chubby" Chaney replaced Joe Cobb as the fat kid. Chubby had an abundance of everything, especially comic talent. Chubby's rotundity, combined with an innocent, babyish face, made him instantly lovable, and he seemed to have learned a great deal from Oliver Hardy in the art of facial pantomime --- Chubby was always good for a killer closeup. Mary Ann Jackson, a befreckled tomboy, owned the best repertoire of facial expressions in Our Gang history.
Hal Roach had an unfaltering ability to find just the right kids to add to the mix year after year, a talent evident not only in his choice of the "stars" but even in the lesser spotlighted youngsters. Each one of the gang members possessed a distinctive face, a knack for doing takes and doubletakes, and a remarkable facility for taking a tomato in the face without blinking an eye. Roach and the casting directors had such discriminating tastes when it came to who would and wouldn't join the Gang that they actually turned away both Mickey Rooney and Shirley Temple, not because they weren't talented, but because they did not fit into his vision of the Gang.
At Roach, everybody learned from the success of Laurel and Hardy that you could double the laughs in a film by following a gag immediately with a funny reaction shot from someone else, and many Gang members seemed to be recruited specifically for such shots. Typical of these unsung gang members was Dorothy DeBorba, the kind of Our Ganger who never had a story built around her, but who could steal a scene from a more seasoned member with a perfectly executed popeyed look or scowl. Our Gang directors, especially Bob McGowan, were experts at coaxing great performances out of these kids, even for two second closeups.
A three year old George "Spanky" McFarland arrived in 1932 and showed so much screen presence, even at that age, that Roach and the directors refocused the entire series around him. Adding dozens of slang replies into the Gang lexicon ("Don't rush me, Big Boy", "You're tellin' me!", "And how!"), Spanky became the center of the Our Gang world almost as soon as he entered it, and continued to be through the forties. He was soon joined by Scotty Beckett (the kid with the sideways baseball cap), and together they provided some funny moments of the early and mid-thirties Our Gang, sitting on the sidelines and commenting on the actions of the bigger kids ("They'll never learn.").
In the middle of the decade, as the country struggled to overcome the Depression, Our
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