Our Gang / The Little Rascals - The First Seven Years (1930) - Filming Locations
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Historical Production & Location Reference
| Film: |
The First Seven Years (1930) |
| Stars: |
Our Gang / The Little Rascals (Jackie Cooper, Mary Ann Jackson, Donald Haines, Allen "Farina" Hoskins, Chubby Chaney) |
| Studio: |
Hal Roach Studios |
Featured Historical Landmarks:
- The Farm At 3147 Overland Avenue: Early scenes in the movie take place at the top of the Overland Avenue hill in the Palms section of Los Angeles, with a rare view of the farm that existed there in 1930.
- Palms Neighborhood Residential Blocks: Serves as the primary stage for the neighborhood segments and the backyard dueling ground between Jackie and Donald.
- 3400 Block Of Mentone Avenue: Mary Ann's house was located at 3415 Mentone Avenue, a filming location that showed up 26 years later in the Abbott and Costello movie Dance With Me, Henry.
Production & Preservation Note: Produced during the late 1929 transition to synchronized sound, The First Seven Years highlights the technical adaptability of Hal Roach Studios crews. While rival studios restricted early talkies to internal soundstages, this short was filmed almost entirely on location in the Palms neighborhood on the Westside of Los Angeles, preserving an invaluable open-air architectural record of the neighborhood before major mid-century rezoning and development.
Jackie has affections for Mary Ann, but she's not interested. And further complicating matters - Donald Haines is also interested in Mary Ann. She suggests that the two of them duel it out with real swords and the winner gets to be her boyfriend.
This is one of the early "talking" / sound movies in The Little Rascals series. When this movie was being made in late 1929, many of the other movies of the time were being made inside sound stages at the studios because film crews had not yet become comfortable with filming outdoors on location.
This Little Rascals movie on the other hand is MOSTLY filmed outdoors, on location in the Palms neighborhood on the west side of Los Angeles. Clearly the team at the Hal Roach Studios mastered the new sound equipment much more quickly than other studios and because of that, they managed to create a fascinating time capsule of the area prior to the massive development that we see there today.
The full then and now video documentary of all the movie locations from this film is in
The Little Rascals Filming Locations Videos section of the site which you can view by
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The Little Rascals - The First Seven Years - Movie Locations
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