Judy Garland's Seventeenth Birthday Party 

I hate that fat fink..Mayer.

I also feel sorry for Poor Judy and her friends..except for that lying fink..Rooney.who always defend that fat fink..Mayer. They should have had fun and They should have had a chance to eat that cake..but..Mayer's dieting rules prevented that.

why couldent he just let them have fun and film them? What a jerk.

How different is that from suburban moms today, constantly making kids stop what they are doing to pose for selfies to post on social media. Today’s kids are very accustomed to having to pose frequently and seem to intuitively accept that the image of what they are doing is more important to their parents than the experience itself.

And once they got all the footage they wanted the kids were pretty much dismissed

And you’d be completely right.

I agree

It apparently never occurred to them, if his autobiography from the 60s is to be believed. They were great pals but chased everything except each other.

Ikr😭😭

kina wondered something like that myself.

If you read the description, you'll find out that this footage was shot on Garland's 17th birthday in June 1939. That's very well documented. MGM shaved a year off of her actual age since she began with the studio in 1935, at 13 years old, to make her seem more precocious than she already was. They claimed she was 12 at the time. It was around 1940 when they stopped doing that. It might seem odd to us in these days of easy access to information, but back then, it was very easy - and very common - for the studios to make things up to suit whatever narrative they were creating for any given star or someone they were building up to be a star. June 10, 1938, was indeed her 16th birthday, but it was just a few months (not three years) before she began work on "The Wizard of Oz" (www.thejudyroom.com/filmography/the-wizard-of-oz/). She worked on it from August 1938 through mid-March 1939, with some retakes in May and late June 1939. Regarding her weight, she went up and down in weight all the time. In 1940's "Strike Up The Band" (also filmed in 1940), she's heavier than she had been in both Oz and "Babes in Arms" (which were filmed in 1938 & 1939). She was never "praised" (at least not in the papers) for being heavier in her earlier films. The mentions in news articles of her being "chubby" go back to at least 1937. She was not seen as a breath of fresh air in regard to her weight. I don't know where you would have gotten that idea. Here is an extensive archive that includes many, many news articles. judygarlandnews.com/on-this-day-in-judy-garlands-life-and-career/ If you peruse them, you'll see the various articles that talk about her weight. It was unfortunate that the columnists made negative comments about her weight when she was just 14, and 15 years old, and throughout the rest of her life. Imagine if they had social media back then!

What's it like to be so wrong and clueless but confident at the same time..fascinating!

this was all staged

Love your comment - so true so true!

What for, Homer ?

What?

really? But it was her actual birthday wasn't it?

It probably was. But I should have said that MGM pre-planned this only for the newsreel.

@Priscilla Williams yeah, mickey considered her more of a sister he never had, he said so himself

I wouldn't say they were "forced" to be together at events. They were the best of friends and were also co-stars in the "Let's put on a show" musicals that were wildly popular. It was natural that they were paired together at events for those reasons and the fact that they were the representation of the youth of America at the time. :

@@TheJudyRoomVideos I could not agree more on that. They both loved each other, maybe not romantically involved- who knows..? They always insisted they were just Huckelberry friends. But towards the end of Judy's life she kept saying on and on that her best memories went back to Mickey Rooney and MGM years.

Let alone JFK was a good friend of Judy- according to Liza Minnelli- and their family friend, Judy and her family even spent some vacations together with JFK and his family when he was The President.

but it's the 30's lol