Little Rascals: The Curse of Alfalfa
There are a lot of famous movie roles that are widely considered to be cursed, from Superman to Terminator’s John Connor to any and all characters that were played by Charlie Sheen. But I’d like to suggest another, even more potentially ill-fated role: Alfalfa from The Little Rascals.
The child actor who originally played Alfalfa back in the 1930s Our Gang films was a guy named Carl Switzer. Here he is singing a love song while soap bubbles came out of his mouth, which was presumably the Avatar of its day:
Switzer ended up dying in, well, one of the worst ways imaginable. Since the Alfalfa gig obviously didn't last, Switzer fell on some pretty hard times as an adult — even when the Our Gang comedies were turned into the popular TV show The Little Rascals, things didn’t improve since royalties weren’t a thing.
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Eventually, Switzer found himself drunkenly fighting someone over a dispute involving reward money for a lost dog, which only ended when the other guy “fatally shot Switzer in the groin.” Yeah, he was straight-up Robocop-ed to death. While there was some dispute over whether or not Switzer was wielding a knife at the time, the coroner ultimately “ruled it a justifiable homicide.”
As for Bug Hall, the guy who played Alfalfa in the 1994 reboot, he’s made the leap from actor to religious loon. Hall was recently “permanently banned from Twitter” — an increasingly difficult endeavor — seemingly for espousing his creepy religious views, including those involving “marriage debt," which is the “belief that married men and women are obligated to have sexual intercourse with their spouse when their spouse demands it” (aka “rape”).
In another tweet, he apparently bragged about “enforcing corporal punishment … on his children beginning at the age of 10 months” (aka “physically abusing a literal baby”). He also wrote a bunch of homophobic garbage I don’t care to repeat. And really, it’s almost impressive that he’s found a way to have a worse “former Alfalfa life trajectory” than the guy who was literally shot in the balls and died over $50.
You (yes, you) should follow JM on Twitter (if it still exists by the time you’re reading this).
