Telling Whoppers

Johnny Downs has been beating up all the boys in Our Gang. Farina and Joe are deputed to give him the beating he deserves. They lie and say they killed him.... and Johnny turns up missing.

It's a typically funny episode of the long-running series, most notable for the sequence when the little rascals club together to chase the bully.

Downs was born in 1913, and spent four years with the series in a couple of dozen movies. Like most of them, he ended his appearances when he hit his teens, but that wsn't the end of his career. He played several characters in features "when a boy", then when into vaudeville for a few years when sound came. An uncredited appearance in MARCH OF THE WOODEN SOLDIERS forerokened his second phase of film appearances. His movie career tailed off in the 1950s, and he became a television personality, doing links between showings of Our Gang on television. When that dried up, he went into real estate. He died at age 80.