O my god you guys, WHAT ABOUT BUCKWHEAT!!
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He-Man Little Rascals Haters Club here.
I always hated this show. It disgusted me in a visceral way I have trouble putting into words. I hated the gross / humiliating names the characters had. I hated the annoying Mid-Atlantic Accent they spoke in (“old-timey movie voice”). I hated how none of it was funny, but you were prompted to laugh on cue. Stupid faces. Oh, tee-hee. 
And the flow of the skits made each one as tedious as sitting through a long church service.
You confuse two kinds of periods in your point. Both Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation are set in the far future. Yet the 100 fictional years between these two don’t count, the twenty years between their production count.
Writers, actors, producers, none work outside their time, their sense of normalcy. And the same is true for the audience. And I’m not arguing that we can’t enjoy works that fall outside of this normalcy, but they have another kind of impact.
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A hell of a lot of my TV entertainment back then was “antiquated.” The Three Stooges, original Superman TV show, 67-70 Spider-man cartoon, Speed Racer, classic Universal horror movies, Shirley Temple movies, I even got to see some of the episodes of Abbott and Costello’s TV show. Was well aware that none of these things were new, didn’t bother me in the slightest.
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Are The Three Investigators still a part of pop culture in Germany?
and in the earlier books, who were they mentored by, if not Alfred Hitchcock?
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Yes, this.
Even the future has a history.
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I probably saw every Little Rascals short on TV at least 5 times when I was a kid. I remember being fascinated by their inventiveness and cooperation. They would plan and execute large scale building projects (like an entire 2-story fire house with a pole and working hook and ladder truck!) one day and cooperate to save a granny from eviction the next. Friendship and intelligence always saved the day. Plus Darla!
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Your name is “Gutierrez”…isn’t the language option a feature, not a bug? 
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We got one channel and it was a test pattern.
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Yeah, pretty much 
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And only one noise; “EEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeee…”
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Yes, they are at episode 187 plus a couple of specials and a prequel series “three ??? Kids”, their adventures as first or 2nd graders or so. In the main series they are perpetual Highschool seniors.
The cast of the audio play do live shows every couple of years, they fill large halls. They also keep the market for prerecorded audio cassettes alive.
Please excuse weird typing errors. I’m feeding a bathing dive year old with apples.
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Alfred Hitchcock. They got only translated, not localized. The newer books still take place in Rocky Beach, even though they are written by german authors. Which is kind of obvious, as they often get details concerning US society, politics, police, etc hilariously wrong.
Anyway they even invented some additional inter-chapters intermissions attributed to Hitchcock, given hints to the younger readers. In later work Hitchcock didn’t appear, iirc the license to use his name expired. They introduced another character in his place, Albert Hitfield, private-eye-turned-mystery-author, but I think they didn’t use him that often.
But my details are very likely wrong, i basically just listen to the audio plays, where they often drop characters and sometimes even tighten the plot . from the corresponding books, to keep the cast at a reasonable number and to keep them at about one hour.
Oh, and the two German handymen at Jones’ scrapyard were turned into Irishmen. Otherwise one of the early novels wouldn’t have worked.
2nd oh: They changed some of the names. Jupiter became Julius, Peter Crenshaw became Peter Shaw.
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Oh, man. Now having a flashback to an episode where the kids are raising money for . . . a fancy dress for mom? A doll for a kid sister? Grandma’s rent money? . . . so they make a “Prize Cake” with a pile of random crap (a rubber glove, horns, an old dress shoe, a mouse trap).
The baking sequence is glorious nutz; the old fashioned range shudders and heaves and makes deranged sounds.
The kids who buy slices then deal with the consequences. “WEEE-WAHHHHHH!”
Ah, thank you YouTube:
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Cardboard box!
We used to dream at night of being able to look at a cardboard box.
We had a pile of gravel that we used to pretend was a cardboard box.
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You’re lucky. We had to stare at the static and pretend there was a test pattern.
Things got better after we got a crayon and we could draw a test pattern on the screen.
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Still, you gotta be choosy with Our Gang shorts. I went to YouTube last night seeking out ones I’d never seen, thinking it would be more of my favorite Stymie/Spanky pairups - “Now I know why Artie choked!” - but the first two I ran into showed some apalling stuff.
Spanky wishing on a lamp for a monkey, Stymie cautioning him to be careful, and Spanky replying that a wish could simply put a tail on Buckwheat’s brother Cotton, and you’d have a monkey.
Also, Spanky in trouble with the gang, so he dresses up in blackface, pretending to be Buckwheat, in order to pass by unnoticed.
Childhood bubble burst.
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I get the point you are making and don’t disagree that many aspects of a production such as the production date, the country, the language can distance someone from the story and characters. I just don’t agree that this is an absolute.
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Many of the shorts were diced up to remove lines like that, or outright taken out of circulation.
My late father had a collection of SILENT Our Gang shorts; some were reshot when sound came around. I should ask my mom if she still has the DVDs.
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