A Look Back at Jack by Dennis Day

If there was anyone who owed his career to Jack Benny, it’s Dennis Day.

Don Wilson was a big-time network sports announcer before being hired for Benny’s show in 1934. Phil Harris starred in an Oscar winning short and had several radio shows with his band (and vocalist Leah Ray) before hooking up with Benny in 1936. Eddie Anderson had appeared high in the credit roll of cast members in a number of movies.

But Day had been a singer on a couple of somewhat obscure local radio shows in New York City using his real name. Benny and his writers built a whole character for Day after being hired in 1939, then fine-tuned it and brought out talents beyond singing that Day may not have known he had. (Stories indicate Day became a pretty savvy businessman, too).

He always expressed his gratefulness to Benny in interviews. Here’s a great example published April 30, 1982 in the local paper in Twin Falls, Idaho. Benny had been dead for over seven years at this point.

Loyal friend
Singer Dennis Day still considers Jack Benny one of best
By STEPHANIE SCHOROW
Times News writer
TWIN FALLS — Even when singer Dennis Day was pushing 40, he was always "that kid" to Jack Benny, his show-business mentor.
For 25 years, on radio and then on television, Day played the naive youngster to Benny's exasperated senior.
"Even up to the very end, he'd say, 'That kid drives me nuts,'" Day recalls.
It's a lasting tribute to the cheapskate comedian that former sidekicks like Day continue to lavish praise on Benny's humor, timing and style.
"When I say Jack and I were like father and son, I mean it. You see, he adopted me, so he didn't have to pay me." Or so Day would say on the show.
Day, who is appearing with banjo player Scotty Plummer today, Saturday and Sunday at Cactus Pete's casino in Jackpot, is eager to discuss the Benny legend.
"There's very few (comedians) able to approach Jack Benny. There's no question he was a master of timing."
As an illustration, Day can't resist launching into the famous skit when a mugger puts a gun to Benny's back and growls, "Your money or your life."
"Wellll, (pause) I'm thinking."
Day, born Owen P. "Eugene" McNulty in New York City in 1917, was fresh out of college when he auditioned for the Jack Benny Show in 1939. He had done some radio shows and sent in tapes of his songs to Benny, who was looking for a replacement for singer Kenny Baker.
He first was signed on a two-week contract, and the character of his domineering mother, played by Verna Felton, was introduced until the young man achieved enough confidence on his own.
Day became a regular on the show, along with Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, Mary Livingstone and Don Wilson. He later appeared frequently on Benny's television show.
Day also had his own radio show for five years, "A Day In the Life of Dennis Day," and his own TV show, which ran from 1952 to 1954.

The still-powerful tenor singer now performs standards, Irish songs and old favorites at conventions and nightclubs throughout the country. He recently toured with "The Big Band Show," along with Harry James, Gordon MacRae and the Ink Spots.
Day also has begun lecturing, mostly to women's clubs, about radio, early TV and Benny.
He answers the inevitable question about whether Benny was really as cheap as he appeared. "Jack had to be the exact opposite. He was the easiest man in the world to work for.
"I never saw him lose his temper except once to a bit player. Thirty seconds later, he went up to him and said, 'I didn't mean it."
Day's own zany image on the show never bothered him. "I was always the silly kid. On stage, I was silly and naive and downright stupid."
Yet, there was always "logic" in his lunacy, "logic to answer the needs of Jack Benny," Day says. The audience found "I could be silly and stupid, and yet accept the fact I could still sing beautiful songs.
Moreover, the dumb-kid routine only worked with Benny. "You couldn't do that silly character with someone else."
Making the transition from radio to television also brought strange reactions. Previously, people had imagined his visage, now they saw it.
"There were either those who thought I'd be short and fat, or tall and slim with hay seeds coming out of my ears."
Day says Benny's Everyman brand of humor continues to win followers in a new generation. "They still love that timelessness about him.
"After all, he was the butt of all the jokes. He was the straight man for us. I always got the better of him. So did Rochester."
He becomes momentarily somber when he recalls how shocked he was when Benny died in 1974. "It doesn't seem possible it's been that long a time."
The father of 10 children and grandfather of eight, Day plans to continue performing. "After all, this May 25, I'll be eligible for Medicare, by George."
But still ringing in his ears before every performance is the familiar command, "Sing, Dennis."

Forget Banking. Draw Gabby Instead

An animator getting paid the same as a bank president?

Really?

That unusual theory was propounded in one of a number of newspaper features in the wake of the release of Gulliver’s Travels. I suspect it generated more laughs amongst the staff at the Fleischer studio than the Gabby or Stone Age shorts they soon found themselves making.

Max Fleischer talked with the New York Herald Tribune’s Tom Waller about the genuine need for more people in the animation, and training for them. With his company making features, Disney making features and a number of studios turning out a regular series of animated shorts, Fleischer knew there weren’t enough people to make them.

Even then, drawing was just one aspect. Characters had to move and they had to show their personality through movement (including expression). The rubber hose of the 1930s wouldn’t do by the end of the decade; Walt Disney’s people had raised the bar.

(Of course, there were other parts in the animation industry. One person left banking and became a cartoon story writer. He ended up making more than a bank president. He was Joe Barbera).

This version of the story appeared in the November 23, 1939 edition of one paper; a cut down version showed up a day later in the Miami News (I cannot find the Trib’s original copy). It appears to have a dropped word which I have added.

Talent Needed For Animated Cartoon Work
Special From the New York Herald Tribune to The Dayton Daily News
NEW YORK, Nov. 23.— Only when colleges become sufficiently cartoon-conscious to recognize the value of a new course, and artistically young men and women are made to realize that “acting at the end of pencil” often pays the wages of a bank president, will the drawn characters in feature-length cartoons become serious rivals of the flesh and blood players who act today before Hollywood cameras.
This is true, according to filmdom's oldest producer of animated cartoons, Max Fleischer, who originated the “Out of the Inkwell” screen strip over 20 years ago. He declares that mass production of such long cartoons as “Gulliver's Travels” and “Snow White” and “Pinnochio” is today handicapped virtually to the point of being stymied by this dearth of men and women who can drain acting ability from system to fingertips then transfer it successfully to celluloid.

While this condition exists the American film industry, [he] reports[,] will be lucky if it can turn out two full length cartoons a year. The ones made so far have been in the process of production two years or more. So the time is not in mind—at least in the professional screen cartoon mind—when Gullivers and Snow Whites can be popped into theaters at a speed comparable to the 400 feature pictures Hollywood grinds out in the course of a single production year. In fact, opines this veteran, it may well not be until some future generation that the film industry will be able to obtain enough skilled animators; that the question of mass feature-length cartoon production and when it will start might then be answered with a degree of accuracy.
Young folks feeling around for a career, and hearing on all sides that law is over-crowded and medicine is worse, that there are too many stenographers and too much regimentation among bricklayers, have a field almost to themselves in screen animation. The jobs pay $200 a week, and up. But, reminds Fleischer, like everything else that is worthwhile, talent and technical training go hand in hand. One is worthless without the other; that why he stresses the need for many colleges to consider this field and include the essentials of it in their curriculum, making this available to all students who show promise of becoming professional animators.
In the entire world today there are less than 500 first-class animators, men who can do all of the original drawings for all of the cartoons that are projected on theater screens, reports Fleischer. Since he opened his studio in Miami, incidentally, the only branch of the film industry to become permanently established in Florida and away from Hollywood, this producer has interested local art schools to the point where they have introduced classes in animation which now have as many as 200 students. Some of these students today are working on "Gulliver's Travels," now in the last stage of production since it is scheduled to make its world premier during the Christmas holidays.

Some 40 odd class animators and as many assistants, as well as 600 other persons in various capacities, have worked on this picture which entered production in May, 1938, almost a year before the Fleischer studios moved from New York to Miami. Fleischer, himself, figures it takes between five and six years of training to become an animator and another two to four years to rate really as a master craftsman.
When youngsters start from the ground up in his plant, Fleischer makes them opaquers or in-betweeners, which identifies them generally as copyists. The pay is small and the work nerve-wracking, but every day their copy is scrutinized and they are promoted according to their persistence and adaptability. Naturally, failures are in the majority, as they are in many other walks of life. Out of an average group of 60 persons, 20 may be selected to "show what they can do" as assistant animators. Of these 20 the average that makes the grade is not over eight.
Thus, as Fleischer points out, under the present set-up the American film industry is way behind in the matter of talented animators and with little means to establish the machinery which Hollywood has, for instance, in obtaining new talent for the screen. While a talent scout ran get a fairly good idea of whether a legitimate actress will make a go of things before the camera, after simply-watching her in stage show, a talent hunter for animators—if there were such a man—wouldn't get very far by viewing some art class at work, since the best landscape artist, according to Fleischer, often would fail dismally if he were suddenly confronted with the many geometrical and action problems which are a part of every good animator's job.

Jumping Jerry

Jerry leaps into the air in A Mouse in the House (1947). Some random frames (Jerry is on ones).



Don Patterson and Dick Bickenbach join Ken Muse and Ed Barge as the credited animators.

Little King Designs

The Van Beuren studio wanted to make good cartoons. I really think they did. The studio put out money to buy established properties—and that couldn’t have been cheap—instead of relying on their own characters like Tom and Jerry or Waffles the cat.

They bought the rights to Amos ‘n’ Andy, probably the most popular show on the radio at the time. They even got the stars to supply their own voices. Yet the cartoons were so amateurish looking only two were made and the deal with creators Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll ended up in a lawsuit.

Then they bought the rights to Otto Soglow’s The Little King. The character lasted 10 cartoons and that was it. He wasn’t funny or wry or whimsical. He was, as you might expect in a Van Beuren cartoon, inexplicably weird.

I’m still trying to figure out the plot of Art For Art’s Sake (1934). About the most interesting things are the character designs, based on Soglow’s newspaper artwork. Feet? Who needs them! I like the opening where the guards on the wall look like cardboard cutouts instead of real people.



And there’s a skeleton. Why? Because it’s a Van Beuren cartoon. It doesn’t have to make sense.



George Stallings directed the cartoon and Jim Tyer gets an animation credit. Win Sharples supplied the music.

Dancing For Laughs

One of the segments in the early part of each week’s Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In was the cocktail party, where some of the players would appear as various characters and spout one-liners in between groovy music bridges.

Not only did Arte Johnson and Ruth Buzzi show up, so did a number of anonymous women who weren’t part of the cast but would take part in the dialogue (Dick Martin always seemed to have one hanging around him).

It appears either NBC or executive producer George Schlatter’s office sent out a publicity package about them to newspapers for entertainment section fodder. The San Mateo Times of February 6, 1971 printed it, among others. (One paper gave the story a byline and moved the dateline to New York).

One of the dancers should be familiar to game show fans because, about a year later, she ended up on The New Price is Right. Janice Pennington stayed on the show until 2000.

Here's how—
Like to join 'Laugh-In' players?
HOLLYWOOD — There’s more than one way to become a member of a zany show such as "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In," and some of the dancers seen in its cocktail party segments prove the point.
One day earlier this season, for example, some behind-the-scenes executives of the show (colorcast Mondays, 8-9 p.m.) lunched at a Burbank, Calif., restaurant located between their offices and the Warner Bros. studios. They noticed that their hostess, an attractive young lady with long, red hair, had an unusual walk. She explained it was the result of her years as a ballet dancer.

"Oh, a dancer," came the response, "you ought to try for a cocktail party spot on 'Laugh-In'." She did — and now the girl, Pat Doty, from La Jolla, Calif., is in the program’s party scenes.
On another occasion, a brown-skinned beauty with long, black hair walked into the "Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In" office to retrieve some photos of herself, left in the hopes they would win her an audition. They didn’t. But her visit did. She was spotted and has worked in about half of the party scenes presented since September. She’s Betty Carr, a full-blooded Cherokee whose Indian name, Gilaki, means "brown dove." Born in Asbury, Mo. (population: 140), she moved to California with heir family, graduated from San Diego State College and has a Masters Degree in Theatre Arts. She teaches educational theatre.
For Millie Knight, who gives the impression of being Eartha Kitt’s kid sister, a door literally opened at NBC’s Burbank headquarters — the studio door off the hallway separating Studio 4 (home base for "Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In") from its soundstage twin, Studio 2 (site of "The Don Knotts Show"). One day, during a break in the Knotts show, the cast scattered. One dancer followed the sound of throbbing music, ventured into Studio 4 and watched a cocktail party segment. She dug the scene and eventually auditioned. That’s how Miss Knight, a native of New Orleans who has never had a dance lesson, became a member of the Studio 4 cocktail party set.
Ar for the other girls — there’s Jeannine Barrett, 6-feet-l, a former Miss California and before that a 4H Club girl; Sandahl Bergman, a long-legged Swedish girl who was named by her mother after the heroine of a novel; Connie Kreski, Playboy Magazine’s 1969 Playmate of the Year; Janice Pennington, next April’s Playmate for the same magazine. There’s baby-faced actress Lisa Moore; Mexico City socialite Carol Richards; Sandra Ego, an actress of American Indian extraction who was born in New Mexico.
Although the avenues which led to "Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In" may be different for these girls, they all have a ball at television’s unique cocktail party.

Runaway Rocks

The First Bad Man (from the cartoon of the same name) scares away homesteaders. This being set in the Stone Age, the homesteaders live in a rock.



They hear the sound of the bad guy.



The gag here is the husband and wife get inside their “home” and are able to lift it and run away into the distance.



The camera sits on a shot of the background. What’s director Tex Avery got planned now? Ah, an outhouse gag.



Outhouse gags show up in Bosko and Flip the Frog cartoons, but I don’t know when Avery first used one.

Tex told author Joe Adamson the cartoon “wasn’t bad.” Part of the cartoon uses the same basic concept as The Flintstones: modern day living is transposed into the Stone Age. Ed Benedict designed the characters in both this cartoon and the Hanna-Barbera TV series, though the latter went through Dick Bickenbach and some other hands before ending up on the screen.

By the time this cartoon was released in 1955, Avery had been gone from MGM for more than two years and, in fact, was out of theatrical animation for good.

Bell Hoppy Background

The establishing shot of Bell Hoppy, released in 1954, starts with a quick pan down a background drawing by Dick Thomas. Director Bob McKimson doesn’t seem to want to waste any time; the camera’s already panning when the scene fades in.

Thomas started out as one of the new, young background artists at Warner Bros., working first in Bob Clampett’s unit making black-and-white cartoons in the late ‘30s. By this time, he was paired by layout artist Bob Givens.

McKimson’s unit was disbanded before Warners shut down its cartoon studio for the last six months of 1953 and wasn’t reassembled when the studio reopened in January 1954. There was some question whether there would be a third unit at all (Friz Freleng and Chuck Jones headed the other units). But it was reactivated several months later with Thomas returning, but McKimson finding himself with a new animation crew and layout artist. Givens eventually returned and the two left for Hanna-Barbera in 1959, though Thomas stopped first at Disney to work on Sleeping Beauty.

Thomas’ last credit at Warners was Dog tales, released in mid-1958

The Sweetheart of Lucky Strike

There were two Canadian singers associated with Jack Benny over the years. One was Gisele Mackenzie, who appeared on stage with him in Las Vegas and popped up on his radio and TV shows on occasion.

The other was Dorothy Collins.

The odd thing about their on-air relationship is they never interacted, to the best of my knowledge. In the radio days, she was in a studio in a completely different building singing whatever version of the Lucky Strike jingle the sponsor wanted in that particular season. When the show was transcribed, she simply cut the song and Don Wilson’s pre-recorded spiel would be inserted in between. There were rare mentions of her in the radio dialogue; Jack revealed on one show that Polly the parrot (Mel Blanc) was a huge fan of hers (Mel responded by squawking the jingle).

After her career with American Tobacco, she was featured on one of the incarnations of the TV show Candid Camera. She was only 67 when she died in 1994.

TV Guide had a charming profile of her in its edition of April 17, 1953. It doesn’t mention the Benny show but one of Jack’s TV broadcasts is the setting for a sidebar to the story showing yet another example of one of the pitfalls of going on the air live.

Dorothy Collins’ Success Key: Listen For Opportunity’s Knock
DOROTHY Collins is now riding the crest of success and she did it all without one use of the “go-getter” formula.
“The only time I ever really tried for anything,” the demure blonde star of Hit Parade and the Lucky Strike commercials said, “I didn’t get it.”
It was about the darkest hour for the 26-year-old singer who is now one of America’s best-known women. The Raymond Scott Quintet, with which she had been a featured vocalist in Detroit, had disbanded. Scott had come on to New York to direct the Hit Parade orchestra, succeeding his brother, the late Mark Warnow. Dorothy was at loose ends.
“I auditioned for a job in one of the New York night clubs,” Dorothy said ruefully. “It was the first and only time I ever went after a job. And I didn’t get it.
“I just didn’t know what I was doing. They didn’t want me. They wanted someone like . . . well, like Marilyn Monroe or perhaps Jane Russell.
But in two weeks from that dark day, she landed one of television’s most coveted jobs, without ever dreaming it was possible.
“Raymond had been commissioned to write a jingle for the Lucky Strike people,” she related. “He asked me if I would sing the words on the sample recording he was making. My name wasn’t mentioned. It was just a way of getting the lyrics across.”
This was the first of the new jingles for the cigarette form and the basis for the idea of staging commercials with all the trappings of a musical comedy.
But the agency people liked that anonymous voice as well as they did the jingle. They signed Dorothy Collins to introduce it. When Hit Parade was introduced on TV in the summer of 1950, she was featured in the carefully staged commercials.
Her winsome charm caught the fancy of TV audiences across the national and she was moved up almost immediately to be one of the Hit Parade principals, along with Snooky Lanson and Eileen Wilson.
Dorothy’s recipe for success is now this simple: “Just be around when lightning strikes.”
Interviewed in the brain factory of Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn, which handles the American Tobacco Co. account, Dorothy proved as sincere and unaffected as when she was plain Marjorie Chandler back in her native Windsor, Ont.
She is still able to giggle on occasion and to say, after revealing that she likes to do “sad love songs” best:
“It’s the first chance I’ve had to do dramatics. I guess it’s gone to my head.
Has Mobile Face
Dorothy is exceedingly gifted along this line with an exceedingly mobile face. Someone has estimated that she uses 47 changes of expression in a 35-second commercial.
“Dorothy,” one ad executive said admiringly, “does everything but wiggle her ears.”
This involves hard work. Dorothy works out the expressions as carefully as a choreographer arranging a dance.
“The things we strive for are naturalness and sincerity,” Dorothy says, “and that’s not easy when you’re giving a performance.”
Makes Film Versions
She learns each routine until it becomes automatic, so that she can do it without a thought. “With all the things going on in the studio during the commercial,” Dorothy explains, “you’d never be able to do it, if you had to think about it. I like to know it so well that I can be thinking of a thousand other things and it just pours out by itself.”
She now makes film versions of the commercials which are used on Robert Montgomery Presents, in addition to the one or two live spots on Hit Parade.
Her career has braced her for surprises. She sang first at 12 in a Windsor theater contest. She sounded a lot like Judy Garland and won first prize. A Detroit radio station invited her to sing on its children’s hour. When she was outgrowing that, Raymond Scott came along and invited her to sing with his Quintet. Then TV came along and invited her to be one of its stars.
She changed her name from Marjorie to Dorothy at the outset of her career. “Dorothy was my sister’s name and I like it.” Then she changed her last name to Collins because this made two Dorothy Chandlers in the family “and it got to be confusing.”
Her crowning success was the Dorothy Collins blouse, and she made that score, too, in her approved indirect method.
Some Movie Offers
She hasn’t had many ambitions beyond her present Hit Parade contract, although she has some Hollywood offers. At the moment she’s concentrating on furnishing her new Babylon, L.I. home.
Married last summer to Raymond Scott, she is still happy and thrilled with homemaking. It’s a big house and they’re trying to furnish it with individual early American pieces.

“It’s really three houses in one,” Dorothy explained. The man who built it moored his yacht there and he started with a garage, kitchen and bathroom.
“Then he built a house onto that, so the outside wall of the first building is the inside wall of the second. Then he built a third house and tied them all together.”
Works on Records
But as far as Dorothy is concerned be it ever so rambling there’s no place like home. She hopes to do something with photograph records, but she plans to do it all within her four (or is it 12?) walls.
A few years ago, Scott bought record-manufacturing equipment to put out his own line of master works. The venture failed, but the equipment remains.
“Now,” Dorothy says, “we’ll make our own records at home and offer them to the Decca people.”
It’s a nice way to work, and it may very well click. After all, things like that happen to Dorothy Collins.

Dorothy’s Longest 25 Seconds
This was Dorothy Collins’ worst moment on television. She was to do a live commercial from New York at the end of the Jack Benny show from Hollywood. She learned two versions—a 34-second spot and a one-minute commercial. And she knew them all perfectly.
The director ordered the short version. At the last second, the Benny show closed early and the director yelled: “The long one.”
“I did the short one,” Dorothy recalls, “then stood looking at the camera for the longest 25 seconds in television.”

The Test of Leon Schlesinger

“I’ll try you on one cartoon,” Leon Schlesinger told Tex Avery, who was bumming around looking for a job after Walter Lantz let him go. And in 1936, that seems to have been Leon’s policy, confirmed by an article that appeared in various newspapers about that time. (Film Daily announced in January a new Avery unit had been formed, then reported in August that Schlesinger had signed Frank Tashlin after he directed Porky’s Poultry Plant).

There’s no byline attached to this story, so its source is unknown. This version appeared in the Hackensack Record of July 8, 1935. “J. Patton King” is a fancy way of saying “Jack King,” the former and later Disney man. Riley Thompson was an animator who received some ‘30s screen credits. Ralph Wolf wasn’t credited at Schlesinger’s but his name was later purloined by Chuck Jones at Warners in the 1950s for a Wile E. Coyote lookalike who failed to capture sheep. Considering Leon’s background was vaudeville promotions and theatre management, it’s not surprising he can’t explain some aspects of film production.

CARTOONING FOR MOVIES IS HARD
Read This And Decide To Do Something Else
When young men go West (West being Hollywood to ambitious youth), they do one of three things: Try to break into the movies as actors, peddle their stories from studio to studio or attempt to sell their talents as animators.
This is about the latter group—those young men who have graduated from art schools or newspaper art departments and who are confident that they can draw animals and insects for the movie cartoons.

Once it was the ambition of those possessed of artistic talent to head for New York and there sell a newspaper comic strip to a syndicate.
Now the story is reversed. J. Patton King, Ralph Wolf and Riley Thompson, to name but a few, gave up drawing comic strips for a New York syndicate to accept flattering offers of Leon Schlesinger, producer of "Looney Tunes" and "Merrie Melodies", cartoon films.
But how is one to get into the animated cartoon business? Cartoonists would like to know.
Schlesinger hired his 60 animators via a test route. Strange as it may seem, cartoons photograph as differently as movie stars. Not even Schlesinger can explain the reason, but such is the case.
Before hiring an artist, he demands a test cartoon. This is photographed on movie film, the same as those of the employed artist. Later it is projected on the screen. If the cartoon photographs "well", Schlesinger considers the artist as a prospective employee.
To be one of the pen and ink creators of "Merrie Melodies" and "Looney Tunes", the artist must be more than a cartoonist. He must know, first of all, animation. That is, he must be able to draw 16 or more cartoons for each movement—of a character. This means that the cartoonist must know anatomy—how the foot moves, how the knee bends, how the hands move and similar anatomical technicalities.
It is not to wonder at then why so many top notch cartoonists have failed to make the grade in Hollywood.

Adding another boulder in the path of the would-be movie cartoonist, music plays an important role in drawing cartoons for the movies. Before the animator is a large sheet, divided into musical beats, which, when translated into terms of music, represents the musical score of the picture. Keeping in mind the beats, the animator finds just what the figure in the film must do, and in what sequence.
The cartoonist must never vary from these orders because the music for the film already has been recorded. In other words, the animator must draw his characters to fit the music.
Those who would be movie cartoon animators should not attempt to enter the business if they have the least tendency of becoming bored. It takes between 10,000 and 12,000 individual cartoons for one film. It takes 12 weeks to make one cartoon.
The most that the cameraman can shoot a day is 50 feet of film—photographed frame by frame. A cartoon is from 650 to 690 feet long and runs on the screen for about six and a half minutes.
Figure it out for yourself.

House of Yesterday

Remember the Tex Avery cartoon House of Tomorrow?

Tommy Morrison at Terrytoons did.

He grabbed the concept, complete with narrator, juicer and the mother-in-law and tossed them into Phoney News Flashes, released six years after the MGM spot-gagger.

“Here is one separate model which has one room for every member of the family—”



“—including mother-in-law.”



“Inside the house we find separate sleeping arrangements for Mr. and Mrs. Householder, Junior—”



“—and for mother-in-law.”



“Each kitchen is completely equipped including an all-inclusive super-juicer for Mr. and Mrs. For Junior—”



“—and for mother-in-law.”



You get the idea. Things go up-hill a bit from here; I actually liked the Cinemascope spoofs in the next scene.

As far as I can tell, Dayton Allen is using his real voice as the narrator. He later does a Durante impression.

Oh, I hope you noted the Mighty Mouse lamp in Junior’s room. Nothing like Paul Terry cross-promotion. Maybe he got the idea from his mother-in-law.