The East Side Kids were characters in a series of 22 films released by Monogram Pictures from 1940 through 1945. The series was a low-budget imitation of the Dead End Kids, a successful film franchise of the late 1930s.

The 1935 Sidney Kingsley Broadway play Dead End was a portrait of life in the New York tenements, featuring six tough-talking juvenile delinquents. When film producer Samuel Goldwyn made a film out of the play, he recruited the original kids from the play: Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Bobby Jordan, Gabriel Dell, Billy Halop, and Bernard Punsly. In 1938, Warner Brothers signed these six actors for a series of Dead End Kids dramas, the most successful being 1938's Angels with Dirty Faces with James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, and They Made Me a Criminal in 1939, starring John Garfield.

Also in 1938, Universal Pictures offered a competing series, under the Little Tough Guys brand name. At one time or another, five of the original Dead End Kids, minus Gorcey, joined the series, resulting in the studio billing the gang as "The Dead End Kids and Little Tough Guys."

In 1940 producer Sam Katzman, noting the financial success of other tough-kid series, made the film East Side Kids, using two of Universal's Little Tough Guys, Hally Chester and Harris Berger. He added former Our Gang player Donald Haines, Frankie Burke, radio actor Sam Edwards, and Eddie Brian to round out the new team. This was a one-shot film, designed to cash in on a popular trend. When Dead End Kid Bobby Jordan became available, Katzman signed him for Boys of the City. "The East Side Kids" became a series, released by Monogram Pictures.

Monogram was a "budget" studio, making inexpensive films for double-feature theaters. Sam Katzman's productions were even cheaper. A typical major-studio "B" picture cost $200,000 to $300,000 to make, and was filmed in four weeks. Notorious penny-pincher Katzman spent only $33,000 per feature and made them in only five to seven days. He wasted no time or money on subtlety, story development, or more than two takes per scene.

Leo Gorcey joined the series, with his brother, David Gorcey of the Little Tough Guys. "Sunshine Sammy" Morrison, the first child actor in the Our Gang comedies, was cast as "Scruno," the only African-American in the Jordan-Gorcey gang.

In the first few films, Dave O'Brien, familiar to audiences from low-budget westerns and serials, and as the accident-prone star of the Pete Smith comedies, played Jordan's older brother Knuckles Dolan, who always seemed to be getting roped into chaperoning the kids from adventure to adventure. O'Brien appeared in different roles as well; the continuity between films was often ignored. As with the Little Tough Guys, the membership of the team changed from film to film, until Huntz Hall joined in 1941, when the lineup was somewhat stabilized. In total, 20 actors were members of the East Side Kids.

Dead End Kid Gabriel Dell drifted in and out of the series as a gang member, a reporter, or a small-time hoodlum, as in Million Dollar Kid. In Smart Alecks, he is an ex-member who left the gang to pursue a life of crime. Rising tough-teen actor Stanley Clements appeared in three films.