Customer Reviews

My Little Margie, Vol. 1

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Usually you look back at old programs like the Lone Ranger and think how hokey they were. Then you realize that you, being a kid at the time could enjoy them as they were. Then there is "Topper" the TV show. It was one big smoking commercial. Well I sort of counted on this happening with "My Little Margie." Boy was I surprised. The plots are complex for the small period of time they have to execute in. Hokey or not they had me laughing. And Price per pound, you get twelve episodes. I am working my way through for a second time. When I get tired, I will put them on the shelf and they look good in the box set.

I saw these when they were broadcast and I bought them for my daughter. They are just as hilarious today as when I first saw them.

This show brings back so many memories of my youth, when TV was black and white, and comedy was funny, not dirty or lame. This is good for young people too. Gale Storm was a wonderful star, and a good vocalist. You will enjoy these old time comedys.

The Roach studios continued their tradition of exceptional comedy in the 1950s, with My Little Margie, in a way, their "new" Laurel and Hardy, as Gale Storm and Charles Farrell were a superb team in a new kind of 2-reeler: the television situation comedy.

As expected, with hal Roach, Jr., at the helm, we get an intelligent mix of visual and verbal comedy - Charles Farrell, a veteran from the silents, was perfect as the clean cut, wonderfully tailored, Investment banker; a widower with a 21 year old daughter, who is *the* antecedent of today's Feminist lead characters, "smart and sexy"...but 50 years ahead of time. Major difference: she does not shout down her dear ol' Dad...just manages to teach him a lesson...with a soft voice...and Love.

The humour derives from each character trying to outdo the other, in good-natured schemes: when one decided the other was overstepping bounds...a wild scenario develops. Usually Vern is left holding the bag. Very much like Ollie.
and the viewer can never be sure where it's all going!

Two standout shows are "The Missing Link", a pleasant satire of the early 1950s' "wrestling craze" - Margie invests in an unsuccessful, but good-hearted Wrestler, to show Vern that she can make a better deal than what he offered to her through Honeywell and Todd; and, "Hillbilly Margie", written by Three Stooges writers, Ullman and Bernds, who really excelled with "rural" themes: Mountain people have inherited valuable stock and H & T seek to buy it from them: Margie and Vern dress up like backwoods folk. It's more than a bit hackneyed, but it works..in fact, it's got many elements found ten years later, in "The Beverly Hillbillies" - even has a character named "Ellie May"! The remaining characters must have also been referenced or I'll eat my Sunday go-to-meetin' top hat!

Going back to the Laurel and Hardy connection, it was Roach, Jr., who caught the BOys on "This Is Your Life" in late 1954, right around the time MLM was still popular, and offered them a regular show. One can only imagine the quality and care that would have been invested in the actors, who spent years being kicked around the Fox and MGM lots, following their great period with Roach, Sr., 1927 to 1940.
What a shame that only the first Laurel and Hardy TV show had any kind of first draft as their poor health prevented any progress.

But imagine what even a cameo on My Little Margie would have meant!

The Lucy Show addition is in colour, from the '60s. Very entertaining, though increibly predicatbel and with some golden lost opportunities. As good as this episode was, we realize that Margie was really at the same level of I Love Lucy, in this Reviewers' opinion.

Once the most syndicated show on television My Little Margie is never shown now and is rather scarce on DVD.
Thanks to releases from Synergy, VCI Entertainment and a couple others we get a chance to see this little gem of a show from a bygone era. The Synergy episodes are good quality and compare favorably to other MLM sets - realize though that these are from the mid-1950s and not remastered.
I did notice on Synergy's Volume 1 set the episode order is erroneously listed on both the box and the DVD menus
with the fifth title actually running first. The correct order is "The Contract", "Countess Margie", "Honeyboy Honeywell", "Margie's Mink", "Shipboard Story", "Who's Married". A little confusing but it eventually dawned on me that I wasn't seeing the episodes I had selected from the menu.
A minor issue to me secondary to having nice quality copies of these rare episodes - just an FYI.