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The Hot Scots (1948)

The Three Stooges (Moe, Larry and Shemp) answer an advertisement placed by Scotland Yard for “yardmen” and they inform the inspector in charge that they are perfect for the job – they are newly minted graduates of the A-1 Correspondence School of Detecting. However, the “yardmen” jobs are for groundskeeper positions, which they grudgingly accept under the belief that they will eventually be promoted to crime solving. Thanks to a note blown from the inspector’s desk into their rubbish clean-up, the trio believe they’ve been assigned to protect the valuables in Scotland’s gloomy Glenheather Castle – which a title card tells us is “on the Bonny Banks of Scotland… but ’tis late, and the bonny banks are closed.”
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The Bootleg Files: The Lord Don’t Play Favorites

BOOTLEG FILES 881: “The Lord Don’t Play Favorites” (1956 television musical starring Kay Starr, Louis Armstrong, Buster Keaton and Robert Stack).

LAST SEEN: On Internet Archive and YouTube.

AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.

REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: Music clearance issues and a poor quality surviving kinescope.

CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Nope.

One of all-time favorite books is Arthur Shulman and Roger Youman’s “How Sweet it Was,” which chronicles American television from the late 1940s through the mid-1960s. While many of the entries in the book are well-known, there was one photograph that always intrigued me – it was for a 1956 musical called “The Lord Don’t Play Favorites” and it showed Buster Keaton wearing a polka dot clown costume and his trademark flat hat while playing a calliope. Next to Keaton was Kay Starr, a popular singer in the 50s, who had a straw hat and a cane while wearing a striped blouse and a long black skirt. The caption for the photo only said that the show was a musical with a circus setting and co-starred Robert Stack, Dick Haymes and Louis Armstrong. (Yes, that’s the photo at the top of this page.)
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Every Bugs Bunny Ever: Rabbit of Seville (1950)

Rabbit of Seville (1950)
Directed by Chuck Jones
Written by Michael Maltese
Animation by Phil Monroe, Ben Washam, Lloyd Vaughan, Ken Harris, Emery Hawkins
Music by Carl Stalling

In my humble opinion, the 1950 “Rabbit of Seville” represents the apex of the Bugs Bunny animated shorts. The film is both laugh-out-loud hilarious and an artistic triumph that creates a slapstick masterpiece on the foundation of symphonic greatness – in this case, the overture to Rossini’s opera “The Barber of Seville.”
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