BOOTLEG FILES 946: “Fun on the Run” (1949 short incorporating sequences from Abbott and Costello’s feature “Here Comes the Co-Eds”).
LAST SEEN: On YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: Only available in 16mm and 8mm formats.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: None.
One of the most contentious political issues today involves the presence of biological men who identify as transgender playing in women’s sports. But back in 1945, the idea of a man playing on a woman’s sports team was strictly the stuff of comedy – specifically, the Abbott and Costello feature “Here Comes the Co-Eds.”
In 1949, “Here Comes the Co-Eds” was sliced and diced by Castle Films for distribution to the home movie market in 16mm and 8mm formats. Three segments from that film were edited and packaged for one-reel release: “Oysters and Muscles” (1948), which featured a wild wrestling match; “Kitchen Mechanics” (1949), which showed Abbott and Costello doing a disastrous job in cleaning the caretaker’s cottage; and “Fun on the Run” (1949), which is featured here.
“Fun on the Run” focused on the final stretch of “Here Comes the Co-Eds.” In that section of the film, the basketball team for the all-women’s Bixby College plays against their rival Carleton College. However, racketeers trying to fix the game hire a professional women’s team to play against the Bixby amateurs. These ringers are tough Amazons who have no problem roughing up their opponents.
When too many Bixby players are forced out of the game due to injuries from the ringers, Lou Costello dons a blonde wig (covered by a football helmet) and pretends to be one of the girls. But when he suffers temporary amnesia due to a foul, he is tricked into thinking he is Daisy Dimple, the top female basketball player. Costello in his amnesiac state becomes a one-man (or one-faux woman) scoring machine, tying the game. Alas, he gets knocked back to reality and accidentally loses the game for Bixby.
However, Costello accidentally discovers that the game was fixed. He grabs the racketeers’ ill-gotten gains and joins his partner Bud Abbott in a wild chase through the streets in a sailboat on a trailer.
The basketball game is one of the most amusing segments in any Abbott and Costello caper, due in large part to Costello’s highly unlikely femme disguise. The idea that anyone who look at Costello and mistake him for a college-age female reaffirms the wonderfully warped logic of comedy films. And aside from feigning a vaguely effeminate twang to his voice, Costello makes no attempt to act in a feminine manner.
Costello was a basketball star during his high school years and did many of the trick shots that appeared in “Here Comes the Co-Eds.” His athletic feats are impressive and fit well into the farcical nature of the story, with the professional women’s basketball players who tower over him.
The chase with Abbott and Costello careening through the streets and into a railroad tunnel on a sailboat atop a trailer is very clever and well staged. It helps if one forgives the obvious use of studio-based rear projection in shots involving the comics and some obvious stuntmen doubling for them in the split-section footage shot outdoors.
The head racketeer in this film is Joe Kirk, who was Costello’s brother-in-law. He mostly did miniscule parts in their films, and this was among the rare times he had a substantial role. Kirk would later find his most memorable role as Mr. Bacciagalupe on Abbott and Costello’s television show. Also present in “Fun on the Run” is Lon Chaney Jr., who played the comics’ caretaker boss and nemesis in “Here Comes the Co-Eds,” and Peggy Ryan, who was a musical comedy star at Universal Pictures during the 1940s.
“Fun on the Run” was released in both silent and sound versions. Mercifully, the sound version is available in an unauthorized upload to YouTube:
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