the Clip isnt on Youtube any more. but i get this from the Museum of Hoaxes website
Google turns up some pages about this. but i dont know any way of purchasing.
1990 Buckwheat Hoax
In October 1990 ABC aired an interview with a man who, so they believed, had played Buckwheat in the Our Gang series during the 1930s. I have a page about this case of mistaken identity in the hoaxes throughout history gallery:
Buckwheat was the wide-eyed, African-American character played for almost ten years by William Thomas. He was famous for his signature phrase, "O-Tay!" After leaving the show, Thomas dropped from the public eye. 20/20 claimed that it had tracked him down to Tempe, Arizona where he was working at a low-paying job as a grocery bagger. It aired an interview with him in which he talked about the cruel twists and turns his life had taken. Unfortunately for 20/20, the man they interviewed was not William Thomas... The man 20/20 interviewed was an impostor named Bill English who had been claiming to be Buckwheat for the past 30 years.
And I've just now discovered that YouTube has a video from 1990 of A Current Affair interviewing the Buckwheat imposter, after he was exposed. Even though it was clear no one was buying his story any more, the guy still insisted he was Buckwheat. Kind of sad and funny at the same time.
This is A Sig
---
IMDB...its not fanboard
reply
share
holbrookp
9 years ago
I don't remember seeing the episode but I sure remember the news coverage afterward! It was discussed in a segment of ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT and David Letterman had a Top Ten list devoted to it. One of the items was "Fact checkers: Never had 'em, never will!"
At about this same time, there was a similar newspaper story of a guy who claimed to have been in the King Kong suit during the filming of the original classic. I spotted immediately that this was fake, for I had read a book on the making of King Kong which stated there were no costumed actor versions of King Kong!
Although it didn't make big news like the Buckwheat story, fans of the show were outraged around this general time period by a guy who was going around claiming he was Our Gang's Porky. He soon disappeared after he was easily proven to be a phony!
"All necessary truth is its own evidence." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
reply
share